Wildfires kicked off 2025 to a rough start for many people in Los Angeles, with many residents forced to evacuate their homes. For many others, they lost their homes in the disaster, including Viterbi professor Jernej Barbič. While Barbič was focused on his lost house, just two weeks later on Jan. 27, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the recipients of their Scientific and Technical Awards. Barbič was one of them.

“My mind completely went to [the fire] situation and dealing with that situation, and surviving and finding some solution for my family and myself. And then two weeks later, this other thing happened,” Barbič said. “And of course I was happy to get this award. But I did tell my wife and everybody that … ‘Suppose there was a deal where I could just return the Oscar and keep the house. I would take the deal. I’d rather have the house.’”

Barbič’s journey to this award has been a long one and while a lot has happened quickly for him, the start of his road to this award began much earlier. 

“I came to America in 2001 and I had $2,000 and one suitcase,” Barbič said. “I made it into a house in the Palisades, and then in the same month, suddenly, two major events happened.”

After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Barbič came to the United States and received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University. Then, he did a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2009, when he joined the Viterbi faculty. While he has always loved academia, he has also had a strong interest in startups.

“I went to academic conferences, and I was presenting my work, and after such an event in 2011 … somebody walked up to me, and they were from industry, and they started talking to me about the paper that I just presented,” Barbič said. “I ended up talking to that person for three hours. [I] had a very good connection [with] my future co-founder.”

The Academy is most well known for the Oscars, but the Scientific and Technical Awards are just as prestigious in the world of entertainment technologies. The Academy announced the recipients of the 14 awards Jan. 27, split between Technical Achievement Awards as well as Scientific and Engineering Awards. 

Barbič is being awarded this Technical Achievement Award in the form of an Academy Certificate, alongside Essex Edwards, James Jacobs, Crawford Doran and Andrew van Straten, for the design and development of Ziva VFX. 

“If you want to [create] a great, great product, it’s not going to be anybody’s specific expertise,” Barbič said. “It’s usually a combination of expertises that are available in industry, or … you read some paper a few years ago.”

Barbič knows well what it means to work with people from different expertises as he had a great team alongside him receiving this award such as Jacobs who has witnessed much of Barbič’s journey to this award. 

“He’s incredibly tenacious. He’ll go after something until he solves it so he doesn’t give up,” Jacobs said. “He is incredibly knowledgeable in the area.”

Ziva VFX is a project by Unity which has been used to create muscles, fat, fascia and skin for virtual characters. Ziva VFX has been used in over 60 films from “Captain Marvel” (2019) to “The Garfield Movie” (2024). It has been used to create realistic effects while also being used for these highly animated and uniquely visual films.

“[‘The Garfield Movie’] is an interesting case, because when we first started the company, we knew that we wanted to do simulation, but then we always thought that simulation would be a fantastic way to train machine learning models,” said James Jacobs, a fellow recipient of the award. “[‘The Garfield Movie’ is] a great example of a movie that was done that way.”

It is not only his colleagues who speak highly of him, but Barbič has also had a great impact on students at USC as well, such as Huanyu Chen, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate studying computer science and a member of Barbič’s lab.

“[Barbič’s accomplishments] could feel a little bit unreachable, because he achieved so much. But I view him as a role model and so it’s like he could be like a target in my life… I wish I could be like him one day,” Chen said.

This isn’t the first time Ziva VFX has applied for this award, having been rejected both in 2021 and 2023, but this time around they compiled a list of over 60 films that have used their product, which gave them a better case to present to the Academy. 

After rejection and a lot of hard work, they finally received the award, but it was not an easy path.

“This award is not just something that I got lucky about, this is something that I’ve been working on actively, for many years,” Barbič said.

Looking forward while still dealing with the aftermath of the wildfires, Barbič is working to shift his focus and expand the utility of his skills.

“I’m thinking about how to spend even more time on medical applications for my research…I don’t want to leave film. I will continue working in film and computer graphics,” Barbič said. “But I’m thinking whether some of the techniques that I’ve developed, if they could be applied also to medicine. I find this field very rewarding.”