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03/15/2023 10:14 AMFor an innovative computer animation program he co-developed, Branford’s Theodore “Ted” Kim has won an Oscar.
During a special ceremony, Ted and co-developers David Eberle, Fernando de Goes, and Audrey Wong were honored with a 2023 Academy Award for Technical Achievement.
While certificates, not statuettes, are presented for such awards, and the ceremony is separate from Oscar Night (held March 12 this year), that’s where much of the difference ends. Honorees get the full, red-carpet treatment. Ted and his colleagues donned formal attire to attend the Feb. 24 event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
“The museum is brand new. It opened during the pandemic, and I think we were one of the first ceremonies of its kind to take place in the museum. So it was a thrill,” says Ted, a movie fan.
And you could have knocked Ted over with a feather when he learned actor Simu Liu, star of Marvel Studio’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), would present. Liu called Ted’s group to the podium to receive their awards.
“It was quite amazing,” Ted says, adding he only learned Liu would be hosting about a week before. “My eyes got very large when they announced it.”
Ted and his colleagues won for designing and developing the Fizt2 (Fizz-Tee-two) elastic simulation system. As described by the Academy, “Fizt2 provides a high-performance solver with novel and stable implicit physics and robust collision. The design of this system enables artist workflows to easily apply soft-body dynamics to a broad range of interacting animated characters and objects.”
In other words, it adds “the soft and squishy,” Ted explains.
Without Fizt2, many moments in amazing movies created in recent years would not have been the same, from its first deployment to expand tires in Disney’s Cars 3 (2017) to 2022 Disney films Lightyear and Turning Red. Ted notes Fizt2 also owes a lot to an earlier program it built upon, Fitzt, developed by Carnegie Mellon professors and first used for cloth simulation in Disney’s Monsters, Inc (2001).
It’s also worth noting this is Ted’s second Oscar for Technical Achievement. His first was received in 2012 with another co-development team for Wavelet Turbulence software. In film sequences, it allows for fast, art-directable creation of highly detailed gas simulation for special effects. It fueled fires and explosions in movies including Sony Pictures The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).
In the spirit of collaboration, creators like Ted and his colleagues share technical developments with the wider world, opening up opportunities for uses in fields such as research, medicine, aerodynamics, and more.
From Academia to Pixar and Back
Ted earned his Ph.D. at University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill. After taking on postdoctoral appointments and becoming a professor, Ted experienced his first Oscar win. He left a tenured position to join Pixar as a senior research scientist.
“It wasn’t a coincidence that the head of [Pixar] research was on the committee that examined the technology that resulted in our first Oscar,” says Ted. “Afterwards, he approached me and asked if I would like to join Pixar.”
Ted was honored to join the legendary animation studios.
“A lot of people don’t know this, but much of the very fundamental, basic technology for creating computer images at all, were developed by people at Pixar in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.”
To those thinking the place is full of “computer nerds,” Ted replies, “...it is a bunch of nerds hacking away at computers; but I guess the part that’s missing is that everyone has a Ph.D.”
Pixar employed about 1,200 when Ted was there, including the three colleagues sharing the 2023 Oscar with him.
“It was a collaboration across many different parts of the studio to bring everything together.”
With regard to the studio’s reputation for top-notch animation, Ted says, “...the polish is what sort of separates the Pixar movies from everybody else. If you don’t notice, but it feels right, then the job is done.”
Even with groundbreaking work, it takes many years between producing new software to the point of being considered Oscar-worthy. Part of the consideration involves the number of movies the tech is used in.
“There’s just a big, time delay between when it’s deployed and when it’s recognized,” says Ted.
In 2019, Ted left Pixar and Los Angeles to move here and take up his current role as associate professor of computer science at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.
“I’m teaching a class right now on the same material that we won the [2023] Academy Award for,” says Ted, who also co-leads the Yale Computer Graphics Group.
Back in Los Angeles on Feb. 24, Ted thanked his wife, Ivy, and their daughter, Rosie, for their support. He also thanked the person who gave him his first shot, by mistake, in the film industry 20 years ago.
“I was an undergraduate at Cornell, and I had taken a graduate class on the topic that they were hiring for,” says Ted. “So because of this, they mistook me for a Ph.D. student, which I was not! Then there was a sort of surprising conversation in the middle of the summer when my boss—and still my friend —made reference to my Ph.D. program, and I said, ‘I’m not a Ph.D. student, yet!’”
Ted thinks he caught a lucky break.
“I think I was safe because I was already doing an okay job. So even though they might not have read my resume carefully enough, apparently, it was still okay.”
The summer internship at the special effects studio, Rhythm & Hues, allowed Ted to assist with developing software for the Warner Bros. blockbuster, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), to animate the Sorting Hat.
Another mention Ted made at the podium Feb. 24 was to thank his UNC-Chapel Hill computer science Ph.D. advisor (professor Ming Lin, now at University of Maryland College Park) for her insight that “...rendering is boring, and simulation is awesome.”
“This was back in the day; it was not so far from the time Jurassic Park had first come out,” says Ted. “Her pitch was more like, ‘People are used to seeing a picture come out of computers already. They want to see those pictures move now.’”
Ted thanks math, and the movies, for allowing him to contribute to the art form.
“To be honest, a lot of my colleagues, they got into this because they liked math, and then they found that movies also involved math, so they could use the math to make movies. I came in from the opposite direction. I like the movies... I like to make pictures; I like to make beautiful animations. It just happens that we don’t use a paintbrush – we use math instead. But the piece of art at the end is really the goal.”