If you are anything like I am about it, watching TV these days is more about checking out the latest commercials and their special effects than the programming itself. Case in point: the recent Super Bowl telecast, where the half-time ads were far more compelling than the otherwise boring game. Or maybe you have taken to looking at MTV with the sound turned down just because the videos' visuals are so nicely done. (I can think of a few rap videos I've viewed this way.)

If it seems that TV's short subjects have more zow and zing than you remember them having before there's good reason. Visual effects being developed for today's commercials and music videos are quickly outpacing those being developed for movies. Used to be you'd have to catch the latest space epic to see the coolest new visual effects, but now just surfing over to the Weather Channel can often result in some really dandy eye candy. So, we're about to introduce you to some of the hottest artists doing the coolest effects for TV.

Jerry Steele. Image courtesy of Steele VFX.

Steele VFX: Bridging the Gap
A standout in today's new breed of visual effects specialists is Jerry Steele. With ten-plus years of post-production experience and over 100 projects to his credit, Jerry, 33, is considered one of the industry's top flight post-production artists. He has a reputation for enhancing the production value of projects he works on with effects that, while sometimes spectacular in scope, are never obtrusive to the point of drawing too much attention to themselves. This uncanny ability to sweeten a product without overwhelming the director's vision makes Jerry much-in-demand as he strives to improve on the original idea, not replace it with something else that detracts.

Jerry's list of credits includes television commercials for Bud Light, Microsoft and WebTV, as well as music videos for Madonna, Janet Jackson and Jewel. He has won two BDA awards, five Tellys and one Emmy. Recently the demand for Jerry's work has been so high, that he has hired a small staff and opened his own studio in west side Los Angeles. Called Steele VFX, the studio has a dedicated Quantel Henry V8 (an eight-layer compositing editor) and a full suite of Adobe After Effects Pro, Illustrator and Photoshop.

So what effect has Jerry worked on that you've seen lately? Well, for starters there's that Gap Khakis commercial that people are still talking about. Voted #1 commercial by the LA Times & TV Guide, "Khakis Swing" (directed by Matthew Ralston), is certainly one of the more recognizable of recent commercials by virtue of its visual effects. It features a group of dancers jitterbugging in khakis. One dancer vaults over the head of another, resulting in an impossible freeze frame that appears to allow the camera to arc around these dancers in 3D space.

To achieve this seemingly impossible effect or "cheat," a group of 35mm SLR cameras was placed in an arc around the subjects. These cameras then simultaneously shot the jump at the same exact instant, resulting in an array of shots from many different angles. These multiple still frames are then viewed one after another with a series of quick dissolves resulting in an apparent camera move around a frozen image in time.

This technique, however, does have its limitations; the apparent camera move is restricted by the layout of the SLR cameras and the move speed is restricted by the distance between the cameras, unfortunately creating a rather fast or unstable appearance. In the case of the Gap effect a departure was made from tradition and the use of 3D software was utilized. As before two 35mm movie cameras were placed at either end of an apparent camera move, the action was shot and then a still frame was captured of the exact same point in the action from both cameras. A 3D mesh was then developed from both images of the dancers, (extruding the 2D image back in space to create a third dimension) still allowing both images to appear unaffected from the front. These two 3D images were then simply morphed together to create a three-dimensional object.