Technologists take note — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released a list of 14 achievements that will be considered for the next round of awards from its Scientific and Technical Awards Committee.

The list of nerdy, geeky, and/or just plain cool technical accomplishments is published well in advance every year so that others in the business have time to raise any claims that the same thing had been done earlier, or better. Claims of prior art or similar technology should be submitted on the Academy's website, and additional entries may be submitted there through Tuesday, August 27.

The awards themselves will be presented on Saturday, February 15, 2014.

Here's the list:

Neutral density filters that remove infrared contamination. 

  • Prompted by the submission of the Infrared Neutral Density (IR ND) Filter Technology (Tiffen Co.)


Untethered HD video assist devices.

  • Prompted by the submission of Meridian (Boxx TV Ltd.)


Software tools for accelerated simulation and rendering of smoke, fire and explosions.

  • Prompted by the submission of Plume (ILM) and Flux (DreamWorks Animation)


Physically based shading and lighting techniques for digital rendering.

  • Prompted by the submission Efficient Physically Inspired Shading (Pixar Animation Studios)


Software tools for integrated sculpting and painting of digital models.

  • Prompted by the submission of Mudbox (Autodesk) and ZBrush (Pixologic)


Pre-computation techniques for visibility and lighting in rendering applications.

  • Prompted by the submission of Weta’s Spherical Harmonics Lighting (Weta Digital)


Compositing systems using per-pixel “deep” depth information.

  • Prompted by the submission of Deep Compositing (Weta Digital)


Software frameworks for integrated and extensible VFX and animation applications.

  • Prompted by the submission of Zeno (ILM)


Integrated software tools for performance capture, visualization and manipulation.

  • Prompted by the submission of MotionBuilder (Autodesk)


Non-explosive car flipping devices.

  • Prompted by the submission of the Pneumatic Car Flipper (Fxperts, Inc.)


Helicopter-based camera motion-control platforms.

  • Prompted by the submission of Flying-Cam 3.0 SARAH (Flying-Cam)


Digital workflow specifications for managing color.

  • Prompted by the submission of ASC CDL (American Society of Cinematographers)
     
AMPAS Scientific & Technical Awards: www.oscars.org/awards/scitech/