The Walt Disney Studios, located in Burbank, California, United States, serves as the corporate headquarters for The Walt Disney Company media conglomerate. The 51-acre studio lot also contains several sound stages, a backlot, and other filmmaking production facilities for Walt Disney Studios's motion picture production. The complex also houses the offices for the company's many divisions, with the exception of Pixar Animation Studios, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios, which remains on its namesake lot in nearby Century City.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the media and entertainment industry. As an internationally recognized standards organization, SMPTE has published more than 800 technical standards and related documents for broadcast, filmmaking, digital cinema, audio recording, information technology (IT), and medical imaging.
Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist and animator who served as the co-founder of Pixar and the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), founded in Hollywood in 1919, is a cultural, educational, and professional organization that is neither a labor union nor a guild. The society was organized to advance the science and art of cinematography and gather a wide range of cinematographers to discuss techniques and ideas and to advocate for motion pictures as a type of art form. Currently, the president of the ASC is Shelly Johnson.
SimEx-Iwerks Entertainment specializes in high-tech entertainment systems, films, film technologies, film-based software, Simulation Hardware Systems and services. The company has partnerships with various institutions, parks, and destinations.
The Producers Guild of America (PGA) is a 501(c)(6) trade association representing television producers, film producers and emerging media producers in the United States. The PGA's membership includes over 8,400 members of the producing establishment worldwide.
The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) was a proprietary collection of software, scanning camera systems, servers, networked computer workstations, and custom desks developed by The Walt Disney Company and Pixar in the late 1980s. Although outmoded by the mid-2000s, it succeeded in reducing labor costs for ink and paint and post-production processes of traditionally animated feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). It also provided an entirely new palette of digital tools to the animation filmmakers.
Albert J. Whitlock Jr. was a British-born motion picture matte artist best known for his work with Disney and Universal Studios.
The Gordon E. Sawyer Award is an Honorary Award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." The award is named in honour of Gordon E. Sawyer, the former Sound Director at Samuel Goldwyn Studio and three-time Academy Award winner who claimed that a listing of past Academy Awards, arranged both chronologically and by category, represents a history of the development of motion pictures. It was first presented at the 54th Academy Awards, in April 1982. The Gordon E. Sawyer Award is voted upon and given by the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee of the Academy.
Linwood G. Dunn, A.S.C. was an American pioneer of visual special effects in motion pictures and an inventor of related technology. Dunn worked on many films and television series, including the original 1933 King Kong (1933), Citizen Kane (1941), and Star Trek (1966–69).
DNEG is a British visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion studio that was founded in 1998 in London, and rebranded as DNEG in 2014 after a merger with Indian VFX company Prime Focus; it was named after the letters "D" and "Neg" from their former name.
Donald Warren Iwerks is an American former Disney executive and co-founder of Iwerks Entertainment along with former Disney executive Stan Kinsey. He is the son of the animator Ub Iwerks and father of Oscar-nominated documentary film producer Leslie Iwerks.
Marc Weigert is a film producer and film/TV visual effects supervisor and 2nd unit director.
Craig Barron is an American visual effects artist and creative director at Magnopus, a media company that produces visual development and virtual production services for motion pictures, television, museums and multimedia platforms.
Eric Brevig is an American film director and visual effects supervisor known for his work in several major theatrical films and television shows. He was Visual Effects Supervisor and Second Unit Director on the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay action drama Pearl Harbor, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Captain EO is a 1986 American 3D science fiction short film shown at Disney theme parks from 1986 until 1998. The movie, starring Michael Jackson, was written by George Lucas, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film was shown as part of an attraction with in-theater effects. The attraction returned to the Disney Parks in 2010 as a tribute after Jackson's death. The film was shown for the final time at Epcot on December 6, 2015.
Claude Coats was an American artist, background artist, animator and set designer, known for his work with the Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering. His pioneering work with the company helped define the character of animated films, and later, immersive installations with his designs for Disneyland. Coats, known as "The Gentle Giant" was inducted a Disney Legend in 1991.
Christopher Townsend is a visual effects supervisor. He has worked in the visual effects industry for over 20 years. For over a decade, he was an artist and supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, and in 2007 became a freelance visual effects supervisor. He worked on Journey to the Center of the Earth, the first ever stereoscopic motion picture shot and released digitally, The Wolverine, Ninja Assassin, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Captain America: The First Avenger. He was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Iron Man 3, oversaw nearly 3000 shots on Avengers: Age of Ultron and was the overall supervisor for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as well as Captain Marvel. In 2015 he was given an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree by his alma mater, Coventry University.
John Bruno is an American visual effects artist and filmmaker known for his prolific collaborations with director James Cameron on films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, Titanic, Avatar, and The Abyss, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Sharon Calahan is an American cinematographer who was director of photography on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Finding Nemo (2003), and was lighting director for Ratatouille (2007), Cars 2 (2011), and The Good Dinosaur (2015). She took part in the early rise of computer animated feature filmmaking and the acceptance of that medium as cinematography. Calahan is the first member of the American Society of Cinematographers who was invited to join on the basis of a career entirely in animated film. She was nominated, with Bill Reeves, Eben Ostby, and Rick Sayre, for a 2000 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects for A Bug's Life.
