Gary Demos received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his pioneering work in motion picture technology. Demos has been investigating scientific issues in the motion picture industry for more than 30 years. In 1984, he received his first Scientific and Engineering Award (with John Whitney, Jr.) for the practical simulation of motion picture photography by means of computer-generated images. A decade later, he received his second Scientific and Engineering Award (with Dan Cameron, David DiFrancesco, Gary Starkweather and Scott Squires) for his groundbreaking work in the field of film input scanning. In 1995, the Academy honored him with a Technical Achievement Award (with David Ruhoff, Dan Cameron and Michelle Feraud) for his efforts in the creation of the Digital Productions Digital Film Compositing System.

Demos and Whitney established the Motion Picture Project at Information International to produce computer generated simulated scenes for such movies as "Futureworld," "Looker" and "Tron." In 1988, Demos established DemoGraFX, a technology research and computer and visual effects consulting company where he specialized in research on high-performance cameras and digital compression based on the discrete cosine transform. He is currently developing new wavelet-based and optimal-filter-based moving image compression technology for high bit-depth and high-dynamic-range imaging.

Established in 1981, the Sawyer Award is "presented to an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." Demos is the 19th recipient of the Award. He has been a member of the Academy's visual effects branch since 2003, and he serves on the Scientific and Technical committee.

John Platt and Demetri Terzopoulos received a Technical Achievement Award for their pioneering work in physically based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures. Their 1987 paper, a milestone in computer graphics, introduced the concept of physically based techniques to simulate moving, deforming objects:
Elastically Deforming Models. Demetri Terzopoulos, John Platt, Alan Barr, Kurt Fleischer.
Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 87). 21(4), 205-214, 1987.

Ed Catmull (for the original concept), Tony DeRose and Jos Stam received a Technical Achievement Award for their scientific and practical implementation of subdivision surfaces as a modeling technique in motion picture production. Their body of work has been presented in a number of SIGGRAPH papers over several years, and their technique has become a preferred modeling primitive for many types of motion picture computer graphics.

David Baraff, Michael Kass and Andrew Witkin received a Scientific and Engineering Award for their pioneering work in physically based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures. Their seminal 1998 paper, "Large Steps in Cloth Simulation," demonstrated that the calculations necessary to simulate realistic, complex cloth could be achieved efficiently and robustly. This work provided the conceptual foundation for many cloth simulation systems in use today.
Large Steps in Cloth Simulation. David Baraff, Michael Kass, Andrew Witkin.
Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 98). 43-54, 1998.