Gravity Is Recognized in Two Categories, but Apes Wins for VFX
The Hollywood Post Alliance announced its 2014 HPA Award winners at a ceremony held at the event's usual venue, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. If you guessed that the big winner would be Gravity, you'd be right — the film was recognized for sound and color-grading, the only production to receive two awards last night. But Gravity didn't sweep — Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was given the organization's feature VFX award.
(That's right: Gravity was a 2013 release, while Apes came out this summer. Unlike the Academy Awards, the HPA has an eligibility cut-off at mid-year. To be eligible for the 2014 awards, productions must have debuted between September 4, 2013, and September 2, 2014.)
For Gravity, Steven J. Scott (Technicolor) won the HPA Award for Outstanding Color Grading — Feature Film, while Glenn Fremantle (Sound 24), Skip Lievsay (Warner Bros. Sound), Christopher Benstead and Niv Adiri (Warner Bros. De Lane Lea) shared Gravity's award for Outstanding Sound — Feature Film.
Other color-grading honors went to David Cole (Modern VideoFilm) who won Outstanding Color Grading — Television for the pilot episode of Reign, and Siggy Ferstl (Company 3) who was recognized in the category of Outstanding Color Grading — Commerical for Doosan's "Heavy Industries."
Axel Geddes (Pixar Animation Studios) and the Skywalker Sound team of Tom Myers, Gary Summers, Michael Silvers and Dustin Cawood won the award for Outstanding Sound — Television for Toy Story of Terror, and Anthony Moore and Tom Joyce (Factory) won Outstanding Sound — Commercial for the Honda Europe spot "Inner Beauty."
Christopher Rouse, ACE, won Oustanding Editing for a feature film for Captain Phillips, while Skip Macdonald, ACE, got the award in the television category for cutting the Breaking Bad series finale "Felina," and Doobie White (Therapy Studios) received the award for editing the Nissan Juke commercial "Trigger."
Weta Digital's team of Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Erik Winquist, Keith Miller and Paul Story won Outstanding Visual Effects — Feature Film for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and the Outstanding Visual Effects — Television award was shared by Jon Bauer (Fire and Blood Productions), Sven Martin (Pixomondo), Jörn Grosshans (Mackevision), Thomas Schelesny (Scanline VFX), and Matthew Rouleau (Rodeo FX) for Game of Thrones episode "The Children." Benjamin Walsh, Dominik Bauch and Brian Burke of Method Studios won the award for Outstanding Visual Effects — Commercial for GE's "Childlike Imagination" spot.
HPA Engineering Excellence Awards were given to Macom, for its 12G-SDI chipset, Nvidia for the Nvidia Visual Computing Appliance, and Wohler and Cinnafilm for their joint venture on Tachyon Wormhole. The ASC Color Decision List and DigitalFilm Tree's cloud-based workflow initiative ProStack, which was used on TV shows Mistresses and Inception. As previously reported, Alan Heim, ACE, and Randy Roberts, ACE, won HPA Lifetime Achievement Awards.
