Weta Digital has won the Hollywood Post Alliance gong for Outstanding Visual Effects for its work on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, having had five of ten nominations in the category in the last two years.
The team of Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Erik Winquist, Keith Miller and Paul Story were the named nominees on Apes, holding off the team of Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton,
R. Christopher White and Eric Reynolds for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
Last year, with three of five nominations for Man of Steel, Iron Man 3 and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Weta was pipped by the team behind intended Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim.
The Hobbit didn’t go entirely unsung last year, with the HPA Awards presenting Park Road Post with a special Judges Award for the High Frame Rate (HFR) technology developed for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. In 2012 Park Road won the Outstanding Sound gong for its work on Steven Spielberg’s Peter Jackson-produced The Adventures of Tintin.
The 2014 awards were announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Friday 7 November (NZ time). The winners of the 2014 HPA Awards were:
Outstanding Color Grading – Feature Film
Gravity
Outstanding Color Grading – Television
Reign – Pilot
Outstanding Color Grading – Commercial
Doosan Heavy Industries
Outstanding Editing – Feature Film
Captain Phillips
Outstanding Editing – Television
Breaking Bad – Felina
Outstanding Editing – Commercial
Nissan Juke Trigger
Outstanding Sound – Feature Film
Gravity
Outstanding Sound – Television
Toy Story OF TERROR!
Outstanding Sound – Commercial
Honda Europe Inner Beauty
Outstanding Visual Effects – Feature Film
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Outstanding Visual Effects – Television
Game of Thrones – The Children
Outstanding Visual Effects – Commercial
GE Childlike Imagination
The HPA Lifetime Achievement Awards
ACE members Alan Heim and Randy Roberts, for outstanding careers in editing.
The 2014 HPA Engineering Excellence Awards
MACOM: 12G-SDI Chipset
NVIDIA: NVIDIA VCA
Wohler/Cinnafilm Joint Venture: Tachyon Wormhole
HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation in Post Production
American Society of Cinematographers: Color Decision List (ASC CDL)
DigitalFilm Tree: Cloud Post Workflow Initiative (ProStack)