Artem CEO Mike Kelt and Sales & Marketing Manager Paul Gorrie met with Production Guild Chief Executive Alison Small at Pinewood Studios to discuss the number and colour of the Awards that will be presented at the Ceremony – this year it is four Gold Awards and one Silver Award. Once we are back at Artem our Senior Engineer Ken White is briefed and begins to design the award. Each year we make small changes to the awards that ensures that they are truly a unique award to receive. Ken determines a production pathway, selects the specialist companies that we work with to maintain our very high standards, and purchases the solid aluminium bar that we make the awards from. The last step before handing the awards over prior to the ceremony is engraving the names of the lucky recipients. This is a closely guarded secret and only trusted to a few of us.

The first thing Ken does is carefully cut the five blank awards from a large section of 6082 –T6 aluminium bar stock. After cutting to size each piece is carefully handled and kept separately so not to damage the surface. Each piece is placed in our CNC 3 Axis Mill and each of the six faces is machined perfectly smooth and square. Ken then carefully sands each piece with progressively finer wet/dry sandpaper until the desired finish is achieved. He then carefully wraps each piece in masking tape for the next step. 

This is perhaps the most crucial step to making the giving the awards their highly iconic “look”. Ken carefully marks out the position of the letters on the masking tape he applied in the previous step and drills small pilot holes so that the waterjet cutting process will not distort the pieces. We use local specialised businesses wherever possible when we have processes that we cannot manage internally and the precision water jet cutting was carried out by CWC in Ickenham, London. Ken delivered the five pieces to CWC with the digital files and collected them two days later. CWC have done a marvellous job – the cutting is fantastic and hardly any clean-up is required. The next step for Ken is to drill and tap holes in the bases to hold the awards during the anodising process and then he carefully sands the pieces again and washes them in a cleaning solution before completely wrapping them up in black plastic cellophane and more masking tape to stop any fingerprints, damage or unwanted oxidisation occurring prior to anodising.

Once Ken is satisfied with the finish and preparation of the awards he hand delivers them to another local business – Metro Plating in Uxbridge, London for sulphuric anodising, and an electrolytic process that coats the awards with a decorative finish. This process offers wide ranges of colours and finishes and gives the awards their lustre and beautiful sheen. The anodising is completed in three days and the awards are delivered back to us carefully packaged and scrutinised carefully by Ken to make sure that they are of the highest possible standard. Ken polishes the awards and wraps them carefully up again, making sure that they are not able to be damaged while he begins the engraving process.