This past week I attended the combined Digital Production Syposium (DigiPro) and The Pipeline Conference, and they handed out the 7th Annual Pipeline Awards (hosted by my friend Dennis Serras), and in doing a bit of research, I discovered that there isn’t (currently) any place listing all of the past recipients so far.
So, in both my desire for proper recognition and my need for complete information, I’ve decided to put together as much as I know.
Update: August 2021
Added the 8th Annual from 30 July 2021!
History
The awards were created by Shotgun Software and were called “Shotty Awards” accordingly. They were given at a small ceremony held at the Shotgun User Group meeting or the Shotgun booth during the annual SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
Shotgun proceeded to sponsor the awards for the first 6 years, and then they handed it over to The Pipeline Conference to continue the legacy.
Structure
The awards generally had 2 categories:
- Tool Awards
- Pipeline Hero Awards: for people who have built amazing things, are super active on the dev list and have collaborated closely with us and with the Shotgun community over the years (not given every year)
1st Annual — 12 August 2014 (SIGGRAPH)
- Motion Capture Tool — Yanna Kang (The Capture Lab)
- The Capture Lab’s mocap tool is a client-facing order tool that eases the process of selecting and ordering motion capture animation in Shotgun.
- BB Gun — Tony Aeillo and Owen Nelson (Laika)
- Laika’s BB Gun tool allows multiple departments with different requirements to use the task scheduling capabilities of Microsoft Project to publish task updates to Shotgun where everyone can see them.
- In-App Artist Tools — Dave Alve, Siobhan Durkin, and Pete Black (Park Road Post Production)
- Park Road Post utilizes multiple custom pipeline tools including an Info Panel in Nuke, Time Log Tool, Reference Viewer, Asset Manager, QT Reference Importer, custom enhancements to Shotgun’s Screening Room, and integration with SGO’s Mistika environment.
- Rhino Engine — Burrows
- Burrows leveraged Shotgun’s Pipeline Toolkit to create a comprehensive workflow for their CAD-based automotive designers, including the first ever custom-built integration with Rhino 3D.
- Pipeline Hero Awards
- Tony Barbieri, Head of Pipeline, Psyop
- Armando Ricalde, Co-Founder and Director of Technology, Cluster Studio
- Mike Romey, Head of Pipeline, Zoic Studios
- Patrick Wolf, Global Head of Pipeline, Pixomondo
2nd Annual — 11 August 2015 (SIGGRAPH)
- Media Submit and Media Link — René Calles (Electronic Arts)
- When artists render out image sequences from the Frostbite game engine, this toolset lets them easily drag and drop their media onto the appropriate task and add notes to all versions uploaded or just specific versions via the details pane. They can tag versions here as well as attach any associated files. Once artists submit work, it is published to Shotgun, compressed and uploaded for preview to the media site, and also renamed, versioned and stored in the server based on the context of the task.
- Adobe After Effects Integration — Sebastian Thiel and Timor Kardum (Omstudios)
- Custom-developed After Effects deep integration with Shotgun
- Smart Publish Notifications — Benoit Leveau (Milk VFX)
- Milk’s Smart Publish, a simple, powerful tool that grew out of experience, ties together publishing and communication, connecting people inside a small studio in an elegant way. It sends ‘smart’ publish notification emails based on rules (rigging to animation, lighting to comp, CC to the HOD of the department, etc.).
- Pipeline Hero Awards
- The Framestore Team: Jesse Lucas, Jesse Spielman, Karsten Wagenknecht, Ian Thompson and Dane Bettis
- These folks are true power users, having designed and heavily customized a streamlined, fully functional multi-site pipeline based on Toolkit that includes all standard Toolkit apps, running solidly in production. They have relentlessly driven Toolkit forward and pushed the Shotgun team (hard!) in that area, and in doing so they’ve achieved something distinctive that benefits the entire Shotgun community.
- Hannes Ricklefs, Moving Picture Company (MPC)
- When you think about people who have had an impact on the growth and understanding of pipelines, Hannes is likely top of mind. We’re recognizing him with a Hero award for his years-long efforts to move pipeline forward and foster industry-wide understanding. Back in 2008 he co-authored a SIGGRAPH paper on the pipelines for The Chronicles of Narnia and followed it up with one on Prince of Persia’s pipeline in 2010. That same year he organized the first SIGGRAPH Birds of a Feather on Pipeline and has been holding it every year since. His co-authored paper on the need for standardization within global vfx productions, co-authored book Production Pipeline Fundamentals for Films and Games, many talks and interviews on the topic, and his Google group have brought the pipeline community together and given it active forums for discussion, idea-sharing and problem solving.
- The Framestore Team: Jesse Lucas, Jesse Spielman, Karsten Wagenknecht, Ian Thompson and Dane Bettis
3rd Annual — 26 July 2016 (SIGGRAPH)
- rez — Allan Johns
- rez is an open source, cross-platform package manager which creates standalone configured environments for third party and internally developed software. Rather than installing packages directly into environments like most other package managers, rez installs all package versions into repositories on disk and references them in dynamically-created standalone environments. rez is widely used by the pipeline community and solves countless package management problems for pipeline developers in VFX and animation production around the world.
- Blur Dev Tools — Blur Studio
- Blur’s open-source software has provided Python integration for 3ds Max for many years, and has acted as the foundation for visual effects and animation pipelines around the world. In addition, a bevy of workflow-enhancing tools for 3ds Max are provided and have given countless artists a substantial boost in speed and capacity. The ability for engineers, technical directors, and artists to write their own tools using Python and build their user interfaces using the Qt framework in 3ds Max has made Blur’s open-source plugins invaluable to the industry at large.
- Shotgun Task Triggering Workflow — Brown Bag Films
- Brown Bag Films has developed two tools – a Task Trigger Workflow Setup utility and a Shotgun Trigger Engine – which help them track the steps required to move tasks along in their asset build pipeline, from artist to artist or project to project. Tasks are pre-created using the task templates and then assigned to artists. When a task is set to “Ready to Start” it goes into the artists queue. Once they have finished their work, the task is set to “Complete” and the triggering engine then sets the next task in the workflow to “Ready to Start” moving it onto the next artist.
- Burrows Dropper Ganger Tool — Burrows
- The Burrows Dropper Ganger Tool enables artists to easily drag assets from within Shotgun in the browser and open them within other applications including Maya, 3ds Max and Rhino. As assets are dropped into the application window, the URL link from the associated webpage is used to set the context, so assets are connected to all of the right things in the pipeline. This tool has massively impacted the speed at which artists at Burrows CGI open hundreds of individual files.
- Pipeline Hero Award
- Janice Collier, Mammal Studios
- Janice was recognized with the Pipeline Hero Award this year for her outstanding contribution not only to Mammal where she has helped create a pipeline for the 15-person company on par with international facilities 10 times their size, but also for her contribution to the ongoing development of Shotgun’s Toolkit. She has provided valuable feedback over the years through her participation in debugging sessions and willingness to have longer discussions with the Shotgun team on Mammal’s workflow – ultimately benefiting the entire Shotgun community.
- Janice Collier, Mammal Studios
4th Annual — 1 August 2017 (SIGGRAPH)
- DWATV Credits Tool — DreamWorks Animation
- NBA 2K17 Facial Animation Pipeline — Visual Concepts
- Time is precious, and the team at Visual Concepts found a way to save a whole lot of it by automating previously manual tasks including tracking video, solving data, converting data to the proper format for the game, generating review material, and notifying supervisors for review and approval. With that long list of automated tasks, we’re wishing we had a pipeline to do our housework!
- Cryptomatte — Psyop
- VFX studio Psyop took home the final Shotgun Pipeline Award for Cryptomatte, which automatically creates ID mattes using information already available at render time including names, object namespaces, and material names. It also supports motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. Recently Psyop’s “Cryptomatte Committee” expanded the tool to the wider community by making an open standard Cryptomatte integrated with Nuke, and AIShaders for Arnold.
5th Annual — 15 August 2018 (SIGGRAPH)
- Turret — UTS Animal Logic Academy
- Turret connects Shotgun and Pixar’s Universal Scene Descriptions (USD) to create a lightweight file resolver architecture that works across a range of content creation applications. Turret has been the cornerstone of the studio’s USD-based system plugin and has transformed overall workflow by pushing the latest data out automatically rather than requiring artists pull data manually. By assembling their scenes using Pixar USD with Shotgun to handle file abstraction and versioning, this educational facility has combined learning about cutting edge pipeline technology with building a system that allows them to rapidly author content and track it in Shotgun.
- LAEL — 4th Creative Party
- LAEL is a dashboard where artists, production teams, TDs, and support staff can manage data associated with the projects they are working on. It provides artists an in-context view into the work that’s assigned to them, as well as easy access to associated files and metadata they need to do their job well. Production and support teams have access to a rich set of functionalities that provides a simple, robust way to manage file ingestion and client deliveries, and TDs have everything they need to manage the structure of a project on disk at their fingertips.
- Shotgun Slate — Zoho Studio
- Acting as a digital slate, this tool records on-set data during shoots and pulls shot data from Shotgun to efficiently fill out the slate with key information like camera type, lens, and focal length. The slate itself runs on an iPad and is captured for each plate shot, and then stored within Shotgun. Shotgun Slate offers an effective way to manage many plates, significantly speeding up the process on set.
- Territory Toolkit — Territory Studio
- Territory Toolkit is a suite of plugins for Adobe Creative Suite and Cinema 4D, giving Territory’s motion graphics artists a Shotgun-based structure and level of control directly within their chosen application.
6th Annual — 31 July 2019 (SIGGRAPH)
- 3D Layouts from 2D Animatics — Quentin Auger and Jean-François Ramos (Studio 100 Animation)
- Recognizing excellence in pipeline tool development, integration and engineering, Quentin Auger and Jean-François Ramos from Studio 100 were honored with a Shotty Award for their development of an innovative new pipeline solution that automatically creates 3D layouts using VR-fueled 2D animatics.
- Shotgun Ticket App for Slack — Anoop Ak (Tau Films)
- Demonstrating ingenuity with a new pipeline tool, Shotty Award-Winner Anoop Ak at Tau Films was recognized for his contribution of a new , further bridging communications for teams working in studios across the globe.
- Pipeline Hero Award:
- Diego Garcia Huerta
- Honoring individuals who have positively impacted the VFX community and empowered artists with innovative solutions, this year’s Pipeline Hero Diego Garcia Huerta was recognized for his development of new Shotgun Engines for Natron, Substance Painter, and Clarisse.
- Diego Garcia Huerta
7th Annual — 13 August 2020 (The Pipeline Conference)
- Pyblish — Marcus Ottosson
- Pyblish is designed to unify artists, platform and software under a single publishing mechanism. Written in cross-compatible pure-Python 2 and 3, Pyblish runs wherever Python runs (and in places where it does not).
- Pipeline Hero Award:
- Fran Zandonella Benjamin and Alexis Casas
- This year’s award committee was excited to surprise TPC’s own Fran Zandonella Benjamin and Alexis Casas with this year’s Pipeline Hero award. Fran and Alexis have devoted huge amounts of their time to growing a worldwide pipeline community, through area meet ups, the SIGGRAPH Global Pipeline BoFs, and now through The Pipeline Conference. Their commitment to the pipeline community has created a way for us all to gather together and share what we know.
- Fran Zandonella Benjamin and Alexis Casas
8th Annual — 30 July 2021 (The Pipeline Conference)
- OpenTimelineIO — Joshua Minor, Eric Reinecke, Stephan Steinbach, and Nick Porcino
- OpenTimelineIO is an open-source API and interchange format for editorial cut information with a large community of developers and users. It is like a modern EDL which can be used to read, write, and manipulate editorial data, and supports plugins for converting between other formats. Initially created by Pixar, it was chosen as one of the first projects to be hosted by the Academy Software Foundation, and contributors come from all over the industry — including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Netflix.
- Pipeline Hero Award:
- Zero Dean
- Zero is an author, photographer, artist, filmmaker, philosopher, and one-man-army who curates 3D-PRO. 3D-PRO is an esteemed international invite-only email discussion list of 3D, CG, FX, VR, Gaming, and other professionals working in related and complementary fields. For over two decades, the 3D-PRO discussion list has proven to be an invaluable resource among a who’s who of companies & individuals all over the world.
- Zero Dean
We’ll see if I add to this in the future, but it’s probably more for me to send to the TPC for a page on their website.
