Congratulations to our two Annie award winners for Surf’s Up. Deborah Carlson won the category of “Best Individual Achievement in Animated Effects” for her wave work and John Clark took the award for “Best Animation Production Artist” for his wave animation contributions. Well deserved!

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 9 from 2-5pm, the Visual Effects Society will offer a sneak peek at some of this year’s nominated work. I’ll be involved in the Surf’s Up presentation.

Come join some of our Nominees as they present their submissions and answer questions. The categories presented include Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series, Best Single Visual Effect of the Year, Outstanding Pre-Rendered Visuals in a Video Game and Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture.

This is a free event and I understand it’s open to the public if you’d like to attend. You can download this flyer for more information.

Surf’s Up got a couple of nice mentions in Variety today. In the article “CGI Lighting get transformed“, David Cohen speaks to our documentary lighting look while highlighting the Academy award nominated Transformers. Thomas Mclean talks about our animated water in his article, “Digital water sends vfx sparks flying.”

Cnet’s Daniel Terdiman writes, “Why Sony Imageworks got an Oscar Nomination for Surf’s Up“. A detailed read about how we made the waves and camera in the film.

If you live in Los Angeles, we also might be on KTLA news at 10:00pm tonight. If it doesn’t air tonight, it will air early next week.

As seen in today’s daily Variety.

The Academy included Surf’s Up in the nominations for Best Animated Feature today. Congratulations to the entire team who made the movie and especially Ash Brannon and Chris Buck who are up for the award!

The VES Awards were announced today and Surf’s Up got 4 nods in 3 categories.

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year

Riding the Visual Effects Tube
Rob Bredow, Lydia Bottegoni, Daniel Kramer, Matt Hausman

Outstanding Effects in an Animated Motion Picture

Riding Waves - CG Style
Rob Bredow, Daniel Kramer, Matt Hausman, Danny Dimian

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture

Chicken Joe
David Schaub, Moon Jun Kang, Brian Casper, Andreas Procopiou

Cody
David Schaub, Pete Nash, James Crossley, Shia LaBeouf

The surfing community has embraced Surf’s Up. Chicken Joe ranked #1 on Surfer Mag’s most interesting surfers of 2007.

From the article:

Chicken Joe didn’t care. He just surfed. A theme that has been the backbone of our sub culture forever.

Surf’s Up makes an appearance as #17 on CG Society’s 2007 Retrospective–”the public-voted list of the most requested cool items for 2007″. They make note of the hand-held camera work and the innovative waves.

Variety has an interesting article today on whether movies like Surf’s Up should be considered for Best Visual Effects in the Academy Awards.

What do you think?