Ahead of the 75th Technology and Engineering Awards next week, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has announced it’s adding a new category celebrating Excellence in Production Technology.
The awards are due to be presented in New York on 9th October.
NATAS revealed the initial list of nominees in February but has now added the new category. The nominees for the Excellence in Production Technology are Christmas at Graceland, The Coronation of H.M. King Charles III and The Santa Clauses, season 2.
NATAS released these descriptions of the nominees:
Christmas at Graceland
For the first time in its history, Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate presents a televised concert celebrating the holiday season. Done+Dusted installed over 40 camera locations on the Graceland property, which spanned over a square mile with a 4-lane highway down the middle. They also utilised tools for cinematic acquisition with Sony F-5500 cameras capturing the show in 24p UHD while delivering a broadcast 1080i/59.94 signal to the network over both fibre and satellite-based uplink.
The Coronation of H.M. King Charles III, BBC / Neutral Wireless / University of Strathclyde / LiveU
After experiencing significant difficulties during the State funeral for H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, BBC News identified a requirement to provide connectivity for news teams for the Coronation of H.M. King Charles III. BBC News and BBC R&D approached Neutral Wireless to deploy a large-scale private 5G standalone network to provide coverage along part of the procession route, guaranteeing uplink connectivity for existing bonded-cellular devices without changing the day-to-day operations for the news teams. Initial viability testing was conducted in collaboration with LiveU at the University of Strathclyde’s rural test site on the banks of Loch Lomond (Scotland), before on-site testing in London. The 7-cell network deployed provided over 1Gbps of uncontested uplink capacity using only 80 MHz spectrum. As the public networks became congested, bonded-cellular devices relied entirely on the private 5G network to go live-to-air. On Coronation Day itself, over 60 devices from 20 domestic and international media outlets used the private network to deliver live news contributions (video and radio) that could not have otherwise been broadcast.
The Santa Clauses, (season two)
In the second season, the Calvin family is back in the North Pole as Scott Calvin continues his role as Santa Claus after retirement plans were thwarted when he failed to find a worthy successor in season one. ILM contributed successfully to the first season with StageCraft LED work. For Season 2, ILM StageCraft was used once again and ILM contributed post visual effects as well. The visual effects work on the project was overseen by Trevor Hazel, with a partnership between ILM’s San Francisco office and SDFX. Together, the team ultimately delivered 333 shots of Christmas cheer for the series.
