Early Work Helped Shape the Look of Tron

Oscar veteran Gary Demos has been tapped this year as the recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Demos, whose name has adorned three previous tech awards from the Academy, will pick up a fresh statuette at the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Dinner on February 18.
The Sawyer Award honors an individual “whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry,” according to the Academy. Demos will be the 19th recipient of the Award, which was first given in 1981.
Demos and John Whitney Jr. shared a tech Oscar in 1984 for their work on using CG imagery to simulate motion-picture photography. (At Information International, Demos and Whitney established the Motion Picture Project, which created CG for movies including Tron and Looker, and they later founded Digital Productions.) In 1994, Demos received a second Scientific and Engineering Award, along with his Information International colleague Dan Cameron, Pixar’s David DiFrancesco and Gary Starkweather, and ILM’s Scott Squires, for work on film input scanning, which was followed closely by a 1995 Technical Achievement Award, given to Demos and his Digital Productions colleagues David Ruhoff, Dan Cameron and Michelle Feraud, for the creation of the Digital Productions Digital Film Compositing System.
Demos launched DemoGraFX, a research and consulting company dedicated to cutting-edge cameras and compression, in 1988, and is currently working on wavelet- and optimal-filter-based compression for high bit-depth and high-dynamic-range imagery, the Academy said.