This page contains the list of the winners of the previous Pipeline Awards, including links to blog posts where photos from the Awards ceremonies may be found.
9th Annual Pipeline Awards (2022)
Pipeline Tool Awards Winners
| OpenColorIO Carol Payne, Michael Dolan, Patrick Hodoul, Thomas Mansencal, and Doug Walker. OpenColorIO (OCIO) is a complete color management solution geared toward motion picture production with an emphasis on visual effects and computer animation. As such, OCIO helps enforce a color management methodology that is required for high-fidelity color imaging in modern computer graphics. Version 1 was released in 2011 by Jeremy Selan at Sony Pictures Imageworks. |
Pipeline Hero Awards Winner
| Tram Le-Jones VP of Solutions for ftrack Tram is currently the VP of Solutions for ftrack, a mother of twins, wife and a tireless organizer for The Pipeline Conference as well as the L.A. Pipeline Meetup. An industry veteran, starting out at ESC Entertainment in 2003 and working at such studios as Rhythm & Hues, Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Method and more. It was at Framestore where she co-founded the L.A. Pipeline Meetup in 2013. TPC was a natural extension of the Pipeline Meetup. |
8th Annual Pipeline Awards (2021)
Pipeline Tool Awards Winners
| OpenTimelineIO Joshua Minor, Eric Reinecke, Stephan Steinbach, 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 Awards Winner
| Zero Dean The founder of 3D-Pro 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. |
7th Annual Pipeline Awards (2020)
Pipeline Tool Awards Winners
| Pyblish by Marcus Ottosson Pyblish is a free, open-source (LGPL) framework written in Python that brings test-driven development to visual effects and triple-A game creation, hosted on GitHub. |
Pipeline Hero Awards Winners
| Fran Benjamin & 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. |
6th Annual Pipeline Awards (2019)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| Quentin Auger & Jean-François Ramos Studio 100 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. |
| 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 Shotgun Ticket App for Slack, further bridging communications for teams working in studios across the globe. |
Pipeline Hero Awards Winners
| Diego Garcia Honoring individuals who have positively impacted the VFX community and empowered artists with innovative solutions, this year’s Pipeline Hero Diego Garcia was recognized for his development of new Shotgun Engines for Natron, Substance Painter and Clarisse. |
5th Annual Pipeline Awards (2018)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| TURRET UTS Animal Logic Acadamy UTS Animal Logic Academy took home the coveted Shotty Award for Turret, a tool which connects Shotgun and Pixar’s USD to create a light-weight file resolver architecture that works across a range of content creation software. It has been the cornerstone of the studio’s USD-based scene descriptor system plugin and has transformed the overall workflow to push the latest data automatically rather than requiring artists to pull data as needed. By assembling their scenes using Pixar USD and using 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. Daniel Flood, Technical Lead and Diego Garcia Huerta, Pipeline Consultant accepted this award on behalf of their team which includes Ben Skinner and Wen Tan who are students at Animal Logic Academy. |
| LAEL 4th Creative Party Eden SeongGyeong An, a compositing TD at 4th Creative Party blew us away with his tool, LAEL, a dashboard that allows artists, production teams, TDs, and support staff to 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 functionality that provides a simple, robust way to manage file ingestion and client deliveries. Now, TDs have everything they need to manage the structure of a project on disk at their fingertips, making LAEL a Shotty Award winner! |
| SHOTGUN SLATE Zoho Studios Created by Technical Director Paul Boots, Shotgun Slate operates as a digital slate by recording on-set data during shoots and pulling shot data from Shotgun to efficiently fill out the slate with key information like camera type, lens, and focal length. |
| 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. While VFX applications like Maya and Nuke are already supported by Shotgun, this proprietary tool bridges the gap between Territory’s VFX and motion graphics teams, allowing for a smooth transition between all DCC apps the studio uses and eliminating problematic and time-consuming manual data-entry tasks. |
4th Annual Pipeline Awards (2017)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| DWATV Credits Tool DreamWorks Animation DreamWorks originally designed this tool to streamline credits by tracking and spell checking the names and titles of thousands of people working across DreamWorks Animation. This eventually grew to also track approvals and revision history. The DWATV Credits Tool now connects to Shotgun and is one of the studio’s most widely-used tools, as it bridges communication across the studio. Chris Bennett, lead animation pipeline TD-Television from DreamWorks Animation accepted this year’s Shotgun Pipeline Award for their DWATV Credits Tool. High-five to the team at 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! The new automated pipeline handles thousands of tasks each day, saving time for artists and allowing them to complete the vast majority of facial animation in-house. This ultimately gives them greater control over the final product. |
| Cryptomatte Psyop Cryptomatte 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 that integrates with Nuke, and AIShaders for Arnold. |
3rd Annual Pipeline Awards (2016)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| 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 CGI Studio 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 Awards Winners
| 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. |
2nd Annual Pipeline Awards (2015)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| Media Submit and Media Link René Calles (EA Germany) 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 Winners
| Jesse Lucas, Jesse Spielman, Karsten Wagenknecht, Ian Thompson and Dane Bettis Framestore 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 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 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. |
1st Annual Pipeline Awards (2014)
Pipeline Shotty Awards Winners
| Motion Capture Tool Yanna Kang (Capture Lab) The Capture Lab has built a client-facing order tool that takes the pain out of selecting and ordering motion capture animation for its clients. |
| BB Gun Tony Aeillo, Owen Nelson (Laika) This tool is an essential part of Laika’s production scheduling workflow and 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, Pete Black (Park Road Post) Park Road has built many tools, including an Info Panel in Nuke, Time Log Tool, Reference Viewer, Asset Manager, QT Reference Importer, Screening Room enhancements and integration with SGO’s Mistika environment. |
| Rhino Engine Burrows Burrows took the Pipeline Toolkit and ran with it, creating a comprehensive workflow for their CAD centric / car marketing material that includes a great artist-facing tool. Their customization of Toolkit asset management makes browsing, loading, and publishing the multitude of components which make up an entire vehicle (and all of their variants!) a breeze. All of this runs on top of a custom built integration with Rhinoceros, the first of its kind for Toolkit. |
Pipeline Hero Awards Winners
| Tony Barbieri Psyop |
| Armando Ricalde Cluster |
| Mike Romey Zoic |
| Patrick Wolf Pixomondo |