INDUSTRY BRIEFINGS
TWO ORGS HONOUR ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE B oth the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) and the Emmys recently announced their coveted engineering awards. Adobe will also be recognised at the Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy
Awards, held on 23 October, both for its corporate achievements and its Substance Painter. Other winners include Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA; Tom Ohanian, Ken Goekjian, Joel Swan and Victor Young for the Avid Multicamera System; and Paul Pan, Yancheng Zhao, Tie Su and Shimeng Bei for the DJI Ronin series; plus parties from MTI Film, Megapixel, MovieLabs and Tiffen.
The HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence honour technical and creative advancements in the production industry. This year’s winners are Adobe for Premiere Pro’s Enhance Speech feature, Disguise and Cuebric for their 2.5D workflow and Evercast for Apple Vision Pro. The winners will be awarded on 7 November.
CALIFORNIA CLAMPS DOWN ON DIGITAL LIKENESSES T he state of California recently passed a bill barring the non-consensual use of dead performers’ likenesses in digital replicas, giving their estates control over AI-generated images and deepfakes. It follows a similar bill restricting the use of living performers’ likenesses, which was passed four days earlier. In both cases, it will become mandatory to obtain consent when creating a digital replica of a famous figure, living or dead. SAG-AFTRA is among those organisations pushing for more restrictive AI-related legislation, which was a major topic of conversation during last year’s strikes. “For those who would use the
digital replicas of deceased performers in films, TV shows, video games, audiobooks, sound recordings and more without first getting the consent of those performers’ estates, the California Senate just said no,” stated SAG-AFTRA. Estates have granted consent to productions in the past; Carrie Fisher’s
likeness consensually appeared in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalke r, as did Paul Walker’s in Furious 7 , demonstrating that obtaining consent need not be an insurmountable legal hurdle. At the time of writing, the bill – referred to as AB 1836 – awaits CA governor Gavin Newsom signing it into law.
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