Ziva VFX honoured with 2025 SciTech Academy Award®
Best-in-class toolset for creation of digital characters recognised for contribution to motion pictures.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced its 2025 Scientific and Technical Achievements (SciTech) honourees earlier this week - and we are delighted to share that the Ziva VFX team has been awarded with a Technical Achievement Award!
The awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
A huge congratulations to Essex Edwards, James Jacobs, Jernej Barbic, Crawford Doran, and Andrew van Straten on this incredible achievement. According to the Academy, the winners demonstrated “a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures”, and we couldn’t be prouder of the team for this recognition of their work.
Ziva VFX is a system for constructing and simulating muscles, fat, fascia, and skin for digital characters. Boasting sophisticated simulation features and real-time character creation assisted by machine learning, Ziva tools enable artists to craft ever-more accurate and scalable digital characters with greater efficiency and control.
Having been Ziva VFX’s biggest customer for many years, DNEG acquired the exclusive license to Ziva from Unity in early 2024, and onboarded a significant proportion of the Ziva team. Since then, the Ziva team at DNEG has continued to develop the toolset to further enhance DNEG’s creature pipeline, supporting DNEG’s artists in the creation of captivating digital characters and creatures across a wide range of projects, including the Venom trilogy, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Fast X, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Animal Friends, and many others.
Talking about the win, Crawford Doran, Director of Ziva Technologies at DNEG said: “It's an incredible honor to be recognized by the Academy. Over the years we've been so inspired by the amazing character work produced using Ziva VFX, and the dialog and collaboration with our users has been extremely gratifying. We're looking forward to continuing to push the state-of-the-art in high-end character effects as part of DNEG.”
Jernej Barbic, Founding Chief Technology Officer of Ziva and Professor at the University of Southern California, added: “This award highlights how cutting-edge research, combined with the exceptional talent of DNEG and other studios, drives real-world innovation and leaves a lasting impact in both academia and industry."
Congratulations once again to the Ziva team on this incredible achievement, and here’s to the ongoing and future development of this Academy Award®-winning toolset!
Find out more about Ziva here.
Read more about 2025’s SciTech winners at The Hollywood Reporter.