Press Release from Steele Studios

Culver City, CA, Oct. 31, 2011 --  Currently celebrating its 15th anniversary year, Steele Studios, a leading creator and producer of visual content for television, film, music videos, and commercial projects for Fortune 500 companies, has completed and delivered a massive, on-air Stereo 3D graphics package for its client 3net, the joint venture, 24/7 3D television network from Sony, Discovery and IMAX. Jo and Jerry Steele, co-founders, Steele Studios, made the announcement.

Beginning November 4, viewers of 3net will begin to see the vibrant, dramatic and compelling new stereo 3D graphics components designed, created, composited and delivered by Jerry Steele and his team. Comprised of over 60 elements, the new graphics include main logo opens, IDs, promotional and sponsored elements, interstitials, promo opens and closes, and many other transitional and supplemental elements. The package represents a visual and dynamic “refresh” of the look and feel of the network. This new work by Steele Studios extends the company’s involvement with 3net, which began months prior with the network’s launch in February 2011. That work included building elements and graphics for the launch, modifying existing graphic elements for S3D broadcast, editing and creating many promos, sizzle reels, flying titles, interstitials, wipes and transitions which have been airing during 3net’s first months.

Steele also completed all of the various complexities included within the Stereo post process for live action elements (convergence, LE/RE color balancing, linearity and geometry, depth budgeting and scripting). Because of the multitude of different sources for the content featured on 3net, Steele was required to re-converge and, in some cases, recreate the S3D for a standard TV size.

The 3net on-air graphics project for Steele Studios comes on the heels of the company’s other recent, very high profile 3D projects. In 2010, the studio completed a 3D video featuring Latin pop star Shakira for the opening ceremony of the World Cup soccer competition. Entitled ""Waka Waka (This Time for Africa,”) the video was the official theme song of FIFA's 2010 World Cup. For the video, Jerry Steele provided stereoscopic supervision, online, color correction, beauty FX, compositing, S3D geometry, linearity and finishing services. “Waka Waka” was seen by over 1-billion viewers around the world, making it one of the most viewed music videos of all time. Jo Steele served as Executive Producer of the project.

Soon after “Waka Waka,” Jerry Steele served as online editor for Avril Lavigne’s hit S3D music video "What the Hell.” Steele was in charge of the video's highly detailed Stereo 3D work, and provided the visual effects, beauty work, color correction and finishing. For the above-cited projects, as well as for the 3net refresh, Steele used the Quantel Pablo 4K with Stereo 3D.

In his role as Stereographer for the new graphics package soon to be featured on 3net, Jerry Steele said, “For these new graphics, we wanted to create really dynamic shapes that exaggerate depth, but at the same time, we were limited to a minimal S3D depth and inter-axial distance. The way we could do this was to use really wide-angle lenses and shoot objects which we’d move only a few nanometers at a time. We had crazy big lenses, giving us massive distortions, which allowed us to exaggerate depth and to ‘stage’ this 3D space appropriately. All the elements in the composite were ultimately shot with different sized lenses and then placed carefully within our limited space. We used a combination of solid and amorphous objects, so that we could ‘bend’ the rules as needed to fit all our pieces in the composites. We relied heavily on the undeterminable shapes that were placed between solid objects to separate them. We ultimately had to exaggerate the physical nature of these constructs, because all of the other visual information around them wouldn’t normally give the viewer the correct sense of depth and mass.”