Dozens of Hollywood organizations, studios, technology manufacturers and individual industry leaders have teamed up to produce a new short film to be used as “Standard Evaluation Material” in the testing of displays, exhibition systems and image-processing tools used today in production and postproduction.
Led by the American Society of Cinematographers, production of Standard Evaluation Material II (known as StEM2) begins today in Los Angeles in collaboration with participants such as Epic Games, Dolby, Warner Bros., Disney, Amazon Studios, as well as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Science and Technology Council.
The short film is being created to emulate a high-end, Hollywood-style movie under the direction of the ASC that could be used as a consistent baseline while evaluating a myriad of different technologies and workflows used to produce movies and episodic series.
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StEM2 represents the same sort of initiative as the 2004 production of the 12-minute StEM short — a scene from an Italian wedding in various lighting conditions— that was led by the ASC and studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), which was used to evaluate and set technical specifications for digital cinema in its early days.
As new exhibition technology continues to advance, ASC identified a need for new baseline evaluation material, and the StEM2 effort began. Having been integrally involved in the making of StEM1, cinematographer Curtis Clark — who is founder and chair of the ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council — is executive producing StEM2. Key contributors include cinematographers Jay Holben, Christopher Probst, David Stump, Steven Shaw and Steven Poster, as well as postproduction veterans Wendy Aylsworth, Joachim “JZ” Zell and Greg Ciaccio.
The completed short is expected to be available to all stakeholders later this year.
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