Progress Medal Award

It is the purpose of this award to honor the individual by recognizing outstanding technical contributions to the progress of engineering phases of the motion picture and/or television industries. The Progress Medal may be awarded annually, and it should be awarded for an invention or for research or development, which in the opinion of the Committee, has resulted in a significant advance in the development of motion picture or television technology. In considering an award to an individual, continued technical contributions over a period of years should be weighed as an important factor.

John Gaeta is a legendary Creator / Designer / Inventor who is best known for his AcademyAward winning work on original The Matrix Trilogy. He has a history of conceiving and developing emergent forms of content, experiences alongside a spectrum of first of kind immersive formats such as Bullet Time, Universal Capture(ie. Volcap), Photo-Anime, HoloCinema, Magicverse.
John has led creative innovation for companies such as Lucasfilm/Disney as Co Founder /Executive Creative Director of ILMxLAB (Star Wars Immersive Entertainment), Microsoft/Float (NUI, proto Hololens), Magic Leap as SVP of Creative Strategy. In 2021, John Gaeta was creative executive producer on Epic Games’ The Matrix Awakens, a UE5 Experience, appeared in The Matrix Resurrections and Executive Creative produced the groundwork development for Animatrix_2.0. In 2022, as co Executive Producer in partnership with Kiri Hart (EP Star Wars 7,8,9), Gaeta commenced development of Metropolis (based on the landmark manga by Osamu Tezuka). In the same year, Gaeta co founded “mirrorworld” venture LivingCities with ar-social platform pioneer Matt Miesnieks(6D.ai) and Dennis Crowley(Foursquare) and most recently has taken the role of Chief Creative Officer of Inworld AI pursuing state of the art AI Characters