Adobe’s Dave Simons, Daniel Wilk, James Acquavella, Michael Natkin, and David Cotter will be given the Sci-Tech Award for the design and development of After Effects on Saturday, February 9th. Other award winners are from teams that created Photoshop (including early AE user John Knoll), Cinema 4D MoGraph, and Silhouette roto; a full list of brilliant contributors was shared by Kathleen Maher at Graphic Speak.
Later, videos of the awards were posted — see bottom of page.
CoSA After Effects 1.0 debuted as a Mac-only app at the 1993 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and become a killer app at version 2 when it integrated its UI windows. You can explore the the history of After Effects in the 2018 AEP article Celebrating 25 years of Adobe After Effects. See also After Effects 20th Anniversary Party, The story of After Effects by Neil Bennett, and David Simons ’86 talks computing at Andover, start-ups, and collaborating with The Simpsons (the latter two had nice discussions with AE co-creator Dave Simons).
We may hear more from awards ceremony, which is often hidden away despite the importance of the tech awardees to filmmaking (visual effects is part of the regular ceremony), but for now you might catch the interview from last year, After Effects: Revolutionizing an Industry and Shaping its Future, with After Effects co-founders Dave Simons and Dave Cotter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Academy posted videos of the awards; here are the ones to Adobe.
