Thursday, October 09, 2003
Frank LIVE (almost) at Radio City Hall
The ANNOTICO Report

I NEVER get tired of talking about Frank!

A Frank Sinatra show this coming Tuesday at Radio City Music Hall will feature the singer - his voice, and digital image, that is - accompanied by a live orchestra.
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SPLICING THE 50's WITH DIGITAL RAZZAMATAZZ

The New York Times
By Marcia Bederman
October 9, 2003

As enviable as Frank Sinatra's life might have seemed, he never achieved his youthful ambition: to attend Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. The lack was noted by the college in 1985 when it awarded the singer an honorary doctorate in engineering.

Whatever technology Sinatra might have missed in life has been lavished on presenting "Sinatra: His Voice, His World, His Way," a multimedia show that opens on Tuesday for a short run at Radio City Music Hall. (The show had been scheduled to open this week but was delayed to work out technical problems.)

The entertainer's inner engineer might have reveled in the processes behind the production, which weaves live performances and large props - including 20-foot-tall puppets of fellow Rat Packers - into video created from film of Sinatra's late 1950's television work, enhanced by computer and projected on large movable screens.

At a technical rehearsal, high tech converged with low. A nest of computer monitors glowed among the music hall's plush seats, while in the lobby a worker hand-sewed a giant Sammy Davis Jr. puppet head onto shoulders.

Much of the focus was on an arsenal of projectors that, in a multimedia ballet choreographed by computer, display the vintage moving images, interspersed with archival stills and video commentary, on screens that slide in and out of the audience's view. The busy screens and elaborate props, along with dancers, a gospel choir and a 40-piece live orchestra conducted by the guitarist John Pizzarelli, add theatrical excitement to the large-screen projections of the Chairman of the Board, which might otherwise resemble the multimedia effects used for presentations by real corporate officers.

Although Sinatra's performances were originally shot on 35-millimeter film, they had to be digitized for restoration and editing, and are being projected in high-definition video. Technicians strove to maintain the cinematic quality of the black-and-white source.

"If it looks like television, it ruins the effect," said Josh Weisberg, president of the Queens company in charge of the projection, Scharff Weisberg. "We are taking digital cinema techniques and applying them to theatrical entertainment."

The task of injecting Broadway pizazz into numbers from "The Frank Sinatra Show," which was broadcast on ABC, to dismal reviews and ratings, in 1957 and 1958, fell to a team of visual effects, sound and projection technicians. Some were raised in lands far from Hollywood and Las Vegas; many are too young to have firsthand knowledge of 1950's American pop culture.

Technicians labored for months with electronic pens and tablets to carve Sinatra's form out of dated variety-show stage sets, using a masking process called rotoscoping. Then they composited, or inserted, his image into colorful computer-generated backgrounds.

Linda Batwin, media designer for the Radio City production, described the Sinatra of the 1950's television footage as "hot Frank." He is the Sinatra of the suit, hat and cigarette, all of which posed a challenge to the rotoscopers, along with his physical idiosyncrasies. (The show also uses some video of an older and plumper Frank.)

"His ears were a nightmare. He had odd-shaped ears, and they wiggled independently of each other," said Mary-Joy Lu, head of production at Guava, one of two visual effects studios that rotoscoped tens of thousands of frames of Sinatra's image. At both studios, rotoscopers particularly adept at carving out parts of the Sinatra form eventually evolved into ear, elbow or snap-brim fedora specialists.

George Tsakas, the owner of the other effects studio, Alter Image, said the aim was to define the star's outline without making him look "like one of those cutouts of Reagan that you could pose with."

Ms. Lu complained that Sinatra often wore Band-Aids on one or more fingers, and that his arms "were never, never still," producing movements in his suit folds.

"He's not dancing, but he does little jigs," Ms. Lu said "He's always tapping or snapping his fingers."

The rhythms of the quintessential swinger also posed challenges for Dan Gerhard, the sound designer. Because the soundtrack on the film reels surviving from the television show recorded only Sinatra's voice and a faintly heard piano, Mr. Gerhard had to create a click track, or electronic metronome, conforming to the singer's tempos in 25 songs. He said he used "human judgment" in addition to electronic analysis.

Because of their seating positions onstage, all orchestra members require small monitors concealed in their music stands to see Mr. Pizzarelli, the conductor. During the song "One for My Baby (And One More For the Road)," a dancer aims a television camera at the conductor, capturing a live image of him that is magnified and dropped into a bar scene from Sinatra's variety show.

Such effects are familiar to members of the music-video generation even if the subject is not. Mr. Tsakas recalled talking with a young man who applied for work on the project, telling him to watch for an e-mail message with "Sinatra" in the subject line. The applicant responded, "What's Sinatra?"

Splicing the 50's Sinatra With Digital Razzmatazz
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/09/technology/circuits/
09howw.html?ei=1&en=b3a97c75555d1cb7&ex=1066724885&adxnnl=
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