First of all, most people haven't won an Academy Award. Secondly, very few people can claim the development of a technology that changed the way movies are made.
Kivolowitz says he's able to attend movies without bragging to everyone around him about his accomplishments. But nevertheless, he definitely has a couple of accomplishments under his belt that should be noted.
Kivolowitz's first company, Elastic Reality, developed morphing technology. He says the two best examples of his technology are in FORREST GUMP (1994) (when the lips of the former presidents move to the words they are saying, or when President Kennedy shakes Forest's hand) and in TITANIC (1997) (when you see seamless transitions between the wrecked ship and the new ship). It's a technology that garnered him a tech Oscar® for morphing and shape shifting.
The company was sold to Avid Entertainment in 1995, and Kivolowitz started his own dot-com in 1997. His Midas touch ended in 2001 when his dot-com flamed out, and he went back to what he knows and what loves: effects.
He formed a new company called Profound Effects and has declared that he is again going to try and change the way effects are done in film. "From 1997 until 2001, I was not in the effects technology business," he said. "It's a business that I love, so I founded Profound Effects to get back into that business. The technology I created in my first company was very important to the last 10 years of movie making, and that technology shows no sign of aging. But the things we're working on now are more geared toward the nuts and bolts of movie making -- the story telling, rather than the flash of it."
Basically, Kivolowitz says, he has created an open platform called "Useful Things" through which users, for a fee, can piggyback off a number of effects technologies.
The product was launched in May 2002, and Kivolowitz says it's going to take some time to educate the public. In the meantime, his company is doing some consulting work for some television companies, but he swears this is just to pay the bills until "Useful Things" takes off.
"[Useful Things] means that users can create entirely new effects technology on their own and download new effects technology from the Internet," he said. "If you buy the base product once, it's an infinite supply of effects. This is disrupting the status quo in effects technology, which was that effects technology is made by a very small priesthood, where it takes a lot of time and not many effects are made. I would like to focus on it being a viral effect, like eBay. Once it reaches critical mass, it will grow exponentially."
It's the difference between blowing a year's advertising budget on one Super Bowl advertisement or spreading out your money through a variety of media and messages. Kivolowitz says his product will not spend as much time trying to create the next liquid Terminator; rather, it will allow companies to have consistent effects that integrate with -- instead of take away from -- the story lines.
Technical Achievement Award (Certificate) 1996: For the primary design, and Dr. Garth Dickie - For the development of the algorithms - for the shape-driven warping and morphing subsystem of the Elastic Reality Special Effects System.
1 Scientific/Technical Award