Inside Film Podcast Episode 1

Pictured are the winners for this years BAFTA awards for the film, 12 Years a Slave

Image via independent.co.uk

The very first episode of our regular podcast has just been uploaded to our Soundcloud account. In this episode we discuss the Baftas, the impending Oscars and a few of our favourite films.

Too busy to listen to it all? The podcast is available for download if you prefer to listen to it on the go. Perfect for the morning commute.

Want to have a listen? Visit our Soundcloud

Inside Film at the Baftas

Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron, director and writer for the blockbuster film, Gravity are pictured with 2 of their BAFTA awards.

Image via empireonline.com

This years Baftas ceremony is all but over and after an incredible year for British film there was certainly some deserved winners and surprises on the night.

If you didn’t join us for our liveblog of the 67th annual award ceremony, or maybe didn’t even watch the awards at all, never fear as the nominations and winners for each category are as follows (lengthy list imminent):

Edit: Just in case you can’t be bothered to read it all, here’s our podcast instead.

Best Adapted Screenplay
Philomena – Winner
12 Years A Slave
Behind The Candelabra
Captain Phillips
The Wolf Of Wall Street


Best Leading Actor
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Christian Bale, American Hustle

Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave – Winner
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street


Best Animated Film
Despicable Me 2
Frozen – Winner
Monsters University


Best Leading Actress
Amy Adams, American Hustle
Emma Thompson, Saving Mr. Banks
Judi Dench, Philomena
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine – Winner
Sandra BullockGravity


Best British Short Animation
Sleeping With The Fishes Winner
Everything I Can See From Here
I Am Tom Moody


Make-Up and Hair
Behind The Candelabra, Kate Biscoe, Marie Larkin
The Butler, Debra Denson, Candace Neal, Robert Stevenson, Matthew Mungle

The Great Gatsby, Maurizio Silvi, Kerry Warn
American Hustle, Evelyne Noraz, Lori McCoy-Bell, Kathrine Gordon – Winner
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, Peter Swords King, Richard Taylor, Rick Findlater


Best British Short Film
Island Queen
Keeping Up With The Joneses
Orbit Ever After

Room 8 – Winner
Sea View


Best Original Music
Gravity,Steven Price – Winner
12 Years A Slave, Hans Zimmer
The Book Thief, John Williams
Captain Phillips,Henry Jackman
Saving Mr. Banks, Thomas Newman


Best Cinematography
12 Years A Slave
Captain Phillips
Gravity – Winner
Inside Llewyn Davis
Nebraska


Best Original Screenplay
Blue Jasmine
Gravity
Inside Llewyn Davis
American Hustle – Winner
Nebraska


Best Costume Design
American Hustle
The Great Gatsby – Winner
Behind The Candelabra
The Invisible Woman
Saving Mr. Banks


Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema
Peter Greenway


Best Director
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity – Winner
Steve McQueen, 12 Years A Slave
David O. Russell, American Hustle
Paul Greengrass,Captain Phillips
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf Of Wall Street


Outstanding British Film
Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom|
Philomena

Rush
Saving Mr. Banks
Gravity – Winner
The Selfish Giant


Best Documentary
The Armstrong Lie
Blackfish

Tim’s Vermeer
We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks
The Act Of Killing – Winner


Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer
Kieran Evans, Kelly + Victor – Winner
Colin Carberry, Glenn Patterson, Good Vibrations
Kelly Marcel, Saving Mr. Banks
Paul Wright, Polly Stokes, For Those in Peril
Scott Graham, Shell


EE Rising Star
Dane DeHaan
George MacKay
Lupita Nyong’o
Will Poulter – Winner
Léa Seydoux


Best Production Design
12 Years A Slave
American Hustle
Behind The Candelabra
The Great Gatsby – Winner
Gravity


Best Editing
12 Years A Slave
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Rush – Winner


Best Sound
All Is Lost, Richard Hymns, Steve Boeddeker, Brandon Proctor, Micah Bloomberg, Gillian Arthur
Captain Phillips, Chris Burdon, Mark Taylor, Mike Prestwood Smith, Chris Munro, Oliver Tarney
Gravity, Glenn Freemantle, Skip Lievsay, Christopher Benstead, Niv Adiri, Chris Munro – Winner
Inside Llewyn Davis, Peter F. Kurland, Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff, Paul Urmson
Rush, Danny Hambrook, Martin Steyer, Stefan Korte, Markus Stemler, Frank Kruse


Fellowship
Dame Helen Mirren


Best Film
12 Years A Slave – Winner
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Gravity
Philomena


Best Special Visual Effects
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton, Eric Reynolds
Iron Man 3, Bryan Grill, Christopher Townsend, Guy Williams, Dan Sudick
Pacific Rim, Hal Hickel, John Knoll, Lindy De Quattro, Nigel Sumner
Gravity, Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, David Shirk, Neil Corbould, Nikki Penny – Winner
Star Trek Into Darkness, Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Ben Grossmann, Burt Dalton


Best Film not in the English Language
The Act Of Killing
Blue Is The Warmest Colour
The Great Beauty – Winner
Metro Manila
Wadjda


Best Supporting Actor
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Daniel Brühl, Rush
Matt Damon, Behind the Candelabra
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips – Winner


Best Supporting Actress
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle – Winner
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Oprah Winfrey, The Butler
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine

The Science and Technical Awards 2013 – The Winners

The winners of the 2013 Science and Technical Awards
The winners of the 2013 Science and Technical Awards

Image via: onlyoscar.files.wordpress.com

Here are the winners of the 2013 Science and Technical Awards.

Gordon E. Sawyer Award

Visual effects supervisor and director of photography Peter W. Anderson, ASC has been voted the Gordon E. Sawyer Award by the Board of Governors, for technological contributions that have brought credit to the industry.

John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation

Post-production and distribution executive Charles “Tad” Marburg has been voted the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation by the Board of Governors, for outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy.

Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate)

To Olivier Maury, Ian Sachs and Dan Piponi for the creation of the ILM Plume system that simulates and renders fire, smoke and explosions for motion picture visual effects The unique construction of this system combines fluid solving and final image rendering on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hardware without needing an intermediate step involving the CPU. This innovation reduces turnaround time, resulting in significant efficiency gains for the ILM effects department.

To Ronald D. Henderson for the development of the FLUX gas simulation system. The use of the Fast Fourier Transform for solving partial differential equations allows FLUX a greater level of algorithmic efficiency when multi-threading on modern hardware. This innovation enables the creation of very high-resolution fluid effects while maintaining fast turnaround times.

To Andrew Camenisch, David Cardwell and Tibor Madjar for the concept and design, and to Csaba Kohegyi and Imre Major for the implementation of the Mudbox software. Mudbox provides artists powerful new design capabilities that significantly advance the state of the art in multi-resolution digital sculpting for film production.

To Martin Hill, Jon Allitt and Nick McKenzie for the creation of the spherical harmonics-based efficient lighting system at Weta Digital. The spherical harmonics lighting pipeline precomputes and reuses a smooth approximation of time-consuming visibility calculations. This enables artists to quickly see the results of changing lights, materials and set layouts in scenes with extremely complex geometry.

To Florian Kainz, Jeffery Yost, Philip Hubbard and Jim Hourihan for the architecture and development of the Zeno application framework. For more than a decade, Zeno’s flexible and robust design has allowed the creation of a broad range of Academy Award-winning visual effects toolsets at ILM.

To Peter Huang and Chris Perry for their architectural contributions to, and to Hans Rijpkema and Joe Mancewicz for the core engineering of, the Voodoo application framework. For more than a decade, Voodoo’s unique design concepts have enabled a broad range of character animation toolsets to be developed at Rhythm & Hues.

To Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their formalization and reference implementation of the concepts behind physically based rendering, as shared in their book Physically Based Rendering. Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. First published in 2004,Physically Based Rendering is both a textbook and a complete source-code implementation that has provided a widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.

To Dr. Peter Hillman for the long-term development and continued advancement of innovative, robust and complete toolsets for deep compositing. Dr. Hillman’s ongoing contributions to standardized techniques and a common deep image file format have enabled advanced compositing workflows across the digital filmmaking industry.

To Colin Doncaster, Johannes Saam, Areito Echevarria, Janne Kontkanen and Chris Cooper for the development, prototyping and promotion of technologies and workflows for deep compositing. Their contributions include early advancements in key deep compositing features such as layer and holdout-order independence, spatial and intra-element color correction, post-render depth of field, and precise blending of complex layer edges.

To Thomas Lokovic and Eric Veach for their influential research and publication of the fundamental concepts of deep shadowing technology. Providing a functional and efficient model for the storage of deep opacity information, this technology was widely adopted as the foundation of early deep compositing pipelines.

To Gifford Hooper and Philip George of HoverCam for the continuing development of the Helicam miniature helicopter camera system. The current Helicam system is a high-speed, extremely maneuverable, turbine-engine, radio-controlled miniature helicopter that supports professional film and digital cinema cameras. Helicam provides a wide range of stabilized, remotely operated pan, tilt and roll capabilities, achieving shots impossible for full-size helicopters.

To John Frazier, Chuck Gaspar and Clay Pinney for the design and development of the Pneumatic Car Flipper. This self-contained high-pressure pneumatic device safely launches a stationary full-sized car on a predetermined trajectory. The precision of operation enhances the safety of performers, and the physical design allows a rapid setup and strike.

To Joshua Pines, David Reisner, Lou Levinson, Curtis Clark, ASC, and David Registerfor the development of the American Society of Cinematographers Color Decision List technology. The ASC CDL unifies color correction principles for use on- and off-set, providing for the faithful reproduction of color values across a variety of color correction devices. This technology provides basic image-processing mathematics that translate the lift, gamma and gain settings to a set of common color values to help preserve the cinematographer’s intent throughout production.

To Jeremy Selan for the development of the OpenColorIO color management framework. OpenColorIO, developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks, is an open source framework that enables consistent color visualization of motion picture imagery across multiple facilities and numerous software applications.

Scientific and Engineering Award (Academy Plaque)

To Ofer Alon for the design and implementation of the ZBrush software tool for multi-resolution sculpting of digital models. ZBrush pioneered multi-resolution digital sculpting, transforming how artists conceive and realize their final designs. ZBrush has enabled artists to create models far more quickly and with much greater detail than previous approaches.

To Eric Veach for his foundational research on efficient Monte Carlo path tracing for image synthesis. Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. In his 1997 Ph.D. thesis and related publications, Veach formalized the principles of Monte Carlo path tracing and introduced essential optimization techniques, such as multiple importance sampling, which make physically based rendering computationally feasible.

To Andre Gauthier, Benoit Sevigny, Yves Boudreault and Robert Lanciault for the design and implementation of the FiLMBOX software application. FiLMBOX, the foundation of MotionBuilder, enables the real-time processing and control of devices and animation. For over two decades, its innovative architecture has been a basis for the development and evolution of new techniques in filmmaking, such as virtual production.

To Emmanuel Prévinaire, Jan Sperling, Etienne Brandt and Tony Postiau for their development of the Flying-Cam SARAH 3.0 system. This battery-powered, radio-controlled, miniature helicopter camera system employs computer-assisted piloting and tele-operation in an airframe that utilizes GPS-assisted flight controls for aerial filming of unparalleled sophistication. Flying-Cam SARAH achieves shots impossible for full-size helicopters, cable systems or other traditional camera support devices.

Academy Award of Merit® (Oscar® Statuette)

To all those who built and operated film laboratories, for over a century of service to the motion picture industry. Lab employees have contributed extraordinary efforts to achieve filmmakers’ artistic expectations for special film processing and the production of billions of feet of release prints per year. This work has allowed an expanded motion picture audience and unequaled worldwide cinema experience.

Got all that? While not as glamorous as the Oscars Presentation, the Sci-Tech Awards gives credit to truly deserving people. Without them, the film industry would not be anywhere near as impressive as it is today. I can speak for us all at Inside Film when I thank these incredible people for their stellar work. Keep it up!

The Science and Technical Awards 2013

The 2012 Sci-Tech Awards Ceremony
The 2012 Sci-Tech Awards Ceremony

Image via: aboutthegear.com

Almost since the very beginning, the Academy has honoured the achievements of pioneers in the fields of science and technology. The roles that these two areas play in moviemaking have been crucial to the advancement of the motion-picture industry.

They were first presented at the 4th Academy Awards ceremony back in 1931. These awards are given to original developments that lead to the most significant improvements in film.

There are three levels of achievement in the Sci-Tech Awards: the Technical Achievement Award, which is a certificate, the Scientific and Engineering Award, a bronze tablet, and the Academy Award of Merit, the famous Oscar statue.

The most recent winners of the Scientific and Technical Oscars have included IMAX, for its large-format, wide-angle films and unique filming methods, and Horst Burbulla, for his invention of the Technocrane telescoping camera crane.

The presentation of these awards are made during a formal dinner that is always held before the famous Oscar ceremony. This has been tradition since the 1977 Awards and different locations have featured, from the Beverly Hilton to the Regent Beverly Wilshire. Hosts of the past have included Charlize Theron, Jennifer Garner and Richard Dreyfuss.

The Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony now generally takes place two weeks prior to the main Academy Awards ceremony.

This years awards will be held tomorrow, on February 15th in the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. Check back here on Inside Film soon for a rundown of the winners.

The 34th Annual Razzie Award Nominations

A Golden Raspberry Award
Kristen Bell and Justin Long sat at a table

Image via: blackfilm.com

The Golden Raspberry Awards, or the Razzies, is an award ceremony that recognises the hilariously bad in film. The ceremony is typically held the day before the Academy Awards, and basically tries to be a tacky version. Funnily enough, the “winners” don’t attend most of the time.

The nominations for the 34th Annual Razzie Awards were released on January 15th this year, and are as follows:

Worst Picture Nominations 2013

After Earth

Grown-Ups 2

The Lone Ranger

A Madea Christmas

Movie 43

Worst Actress Nominations 2013

Halle Berry (The Call and Movie 43)

Selena Gomez (The Getaway)

Lindsey Lohan (The Canyons)

Tyler Perry (A Madea Christmas)

Naomi Watts (Diana and Movie 43)

Worst Actor Nominations 2013

Johnny Depp (The Lone Ranger)

Ashton Kutcher (Jobs)

Adam Sandler (Grown-Ups 2)

Jaden Smith (After Earth)

Sylvester Stallone (Bullet to the Head, Grudge Match and Escape Plan)

Worst Supporting Actress Nominations 2013

Lady Gaga (Machette Kills)

Salma Hayek (Grown-Ups 2)

Katherine Heigl (The Big Wedding)

Kim Kardashian (Temptation)

Lindsey Lohan (InAPPropriate Comedy and Scary Movie 5)

Worst Supporting Actor Nominations 2013

Chris Brown (Battle of the Year)

Larry the Cable Guy (A Madea Christmas)

Taylor Lautner (Grown-Ups 2)

Will Smith (After Earth)

Nick Swardson (A Haunted House and Grown-Ups 2)

Worst Screen Combo Nominations 2013

The entire cast of Grown-Ups 2

The entire cast of Movie 43

Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen (Scary Movie 5)

Tyler Perry and either Larry the Cable Guy or That Worn-Out Wig and Dress

Will and Jaden Smith on Planet Nepotism (After Earth)

Worst Director Nominations 2013

The 13 people who directed Movie 43

Dennis Dugan (Grown-Ups 2)

Tyler Perry (A Madea Christmas and Temptation)

M. Night Shyamalan (After Earth)

Gore Verbinski (The Lone Ranger)

Worst Screenplay Nominations 2013

After Earth (Screenplay by Gary Whitta and M. Night Shyamalan,
Story by Will Smith)

Grown-Ups 2 (Written by Fred Wolfe & Adam Sandler & Tim Herlihy)

The Lone Ranger (Screen Story & Screenplay by Ted Elliott,
Justin Haythe & Terry Rosso)

A Madea Christmas (Written by Tyler Perry)

Movie 43 (written by 19 “screenwriters”)

Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel 2013

Grown-Ups 2

The Hangover III

The Lone Ranger

Scary Movie 5

The Smurfs 2

Stay here on Inside Film to see who wins! Or loses, however you say it.