Animal Logic’s Andy Brown and Kirsty Millar, co-Visual Effects Supervisors on Director Zhang Yimou’s stunning martial arts film House of Flying Daggers have been awarded a prestigious SATELLITE Award for ‘Best Visual Effects’ at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles last night.

Brown and Millar worked with Yimou’s crew on pre-visualisation and on-set digital production spending a total of 12 weeks on location in China and the Ukraine. Due to a compressed schedule, they supervised and completed a number of temporary shots there before returning to Australia to complete the sequences with the Animal Logic digital effects team. At the project’s completion, Animal Logics’ digital artists had completed more than 100 shots in key sequences of the film under the direction of Brown and Millar.

Brown and Millar have released a joint statement thanking the Animal Logic crew and Zhang Yimou’s crew.

“We would like to give a special thanks to the Director Zhang Yimou. It has been a privilege to work with him and his crew on House of Flying Daggers and Hero. We certainly hope that we will continue to collaborate in the future. We would also like to thank the whole team at Animal Logic who worked so hard to produce incredible visual effects which helped to bring the Directors vision for the story to life. In particular, we would like to thank Producer Fiona Crawford and Production Manager Danielle Rubin, 3D gurus Luke Hetherington and Scott Hunter, 2D artist Dave Dally and Morgane Furio. We’d also like to express how proud we are to win this Award which signifies that we have been judged to be among the world's best. For all of us at Animal Logic it is exciting and humbling. Thank you so much!”

The Satellite Awards are held annually by the International Press Academy and honour the most outstanding achievements in the fields of cinema, television and interactive media. With a membership of over 200 working press representing international markets, the International Press Academy reaches more than 500 million people globally via major print, television, radio, cable, and new media outlets and the Internet.

Brown and Millar share the ‘Best Visual Effects’ Satellite Award with Rob Legato, Pete Travers, Matthew Gratzner and Bruce Steinheimer who were also presented with an Award for their visual effects work on The Aviator.

House of Flying Daggers was also awarded in the category of Best Cinematography.