While audiences at Broadway‘s “West Side Story” thrill to the on-stage drama, musicians in the orchestra pit are fighting a battle every bit as vicious as the Sharks-Jets rivalry.

This is gang warfare of a high-minded sort, pitting some of New York’s best live musicians against a synthesizer they fear will usurp the job of playing Leonard Bernstein‘s pulsating score.

Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they’re especially popular with provincial or touring companies.

But until mid-July — when “West Side Story’s” producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra’s string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend.

“It was the last straw for me,” Woodiel told AFP.

“I was a student and a friend of Leonard Bernstein and it’s almost certain he wouldn’t have allowed this. This isn’t dinner theater, it’s not Las Vegas. It’s Broadway and Leonard Bernstein was the greatest American musician.”

Woodiel’s own job was spared, but he caused a stir through the tight-knit Broadway world with a New York Times piece denouncing the “inert, artificial” synthesizer invasion.

The producers did not respond to AFP requests to be interviewed.

Synthesizers have in fact been around for decades, notably in pop music. What’s changing is the ability of the machines to enter the far more sophisticated domain of classical orchestras.

“The computer gives you so much more power now. There’s ridiculous stuff,” says Mike Levine, editor of Electronic Musician Magazine.

There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players.

“It has gotten very, very good with something like drums and bass and strings,” Levine said. “With piano they can model almost anything.”

Levine said the growing use of synthesizers is positive for basement bands and other music industry start-ups, but a menace to jobs in large, labor-intensive ensembles like orchestras.

“It’s all about money and the producers want to make as much money as possible,” Levine said. “They always did.”

Critics see synthesizers as little better than some barbarian force trampling the classical music landscape.

But one virtual music pioneer, Paul Henry Smith of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, says the technology will only improve and in any case cannot be stopped.

Smith’s system uses so-called digital sampling, feeding from a store of more than two million individual notes recorded in an almost endless variety of tones and styles. “It’s kind of insane,” he says.

“We don’t quite know what’s going to happen with this, but computer technology is just so malleable that the likelihood of it going away is probably nil.”

Like many new technologies, virtual music poses growing ethical questions.

New York Post arts writer Barbara Hoffman says using a synthesizer in “West Side Story” amounts to cheating theater-goers.

“When you pay over 100 dollars a ticket you should hear real music the way Leonard Bernstein intended it,” she said. “Something as sacred as that score, one of the most beautiful scores ever written — it’s blasphemous.”

But it remains unclear whether audiences around the country realize what’s going on, or necessarily care.

Sarah Franklin, a talented 24-year-old violinist, joined a five-month North America tour for a revival of the musical “Camelot” with an orchestra of just four people.

“There was me on the violin, one cello, one French horn and a conductor with a computer,” she said. The computer, using a software called Notion, played the rest of the semi-virtual orchestra.

Frequently the program crashed, abruptly leaving the three live musicians to play by themselves. But despite the glitches, most audience members were none the wiser, Franklin said.

“When people saw us down in the pit afterwards, they’d say, ‘It sounded like there were so many more of you!’”

The musicians would wriggle out of the embarrassing situation by pretending that the rest of their colleagues had quickly left the theater.

“We got fed up with explaining and we didn’t want to ruin it for them. They didn’t need to know,” Franklin said.

True aficionados can immediately tell the difference between real and manufactured music.

Woodiel compares playing alongside a synthesizer to “making love with a corpse.”

Even Smith readily concedes that today’s virtual instruments cannot match live string players “by a long shot.”

But advocates argue that axing salaried musicians in favor of a machine during today’s economic uncertainty can extend the life of a flagging production, thereby saving many other jobs.

Smith, who studied with Bernstein and researched digital sound at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the most important benefits are subtle.

He sees virtual orchestra programs as a new instrument in their own right, as well as a tool for composers to “get their ideas into sound” and bring new material to human orchestras — thereby creating work.

“It’s not always a bad boy,” Smith said. “It’s a branching out and expanding of possibilities.”

Peter Reit, who plays French horn in Broadway’s “Phantom of the Opera” — where two strings players have been replaced by a synthesizer — has a more gloomy prognosis in what he calls the “corporate” music landscape.

“You get the feeling that if they had their way, ideally, they would have an entire virtual orchestra,” he said.

“They would have all of us replaced with one electronic instrument, then feed that to the public and make more money.”

NEW YORK — State-of-the-art new rides including a roller coaster and a pendulum will open this summer at Coney Island to jump-start the resurgence of the famed Brooklyn amusement park, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.

"Coney Island is coming back, big time," Bloomberg said at a news conference near the boardwalk where the decades-old Astroland rides were dismantled in 2008.

The new rides are being created by Zamperla, the world’s leading manufacturer of mechanical rides, based in Altavilla Vicentina, Italy.

Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride’s global debut.

Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America’s concept of fast food.

By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.

Central Amusement International of Parsippany, N.J., is investing about $30 million to build and operate the park. The company signed a 10-year lease for about 6 acres of land including the former Astroland site, paying the city $1 million plus part of gross receipts.

"We will have rides that will flip you, turn you, launch you, drop you, splash you and make the mayor want to lose his lunch," said David Galst, a CAI spokesman.

Not all of Coney Island’s old amusements were scrapped.

The 1920s Cyclone roller coaster is landmarked, as is Deno’s Wonder Wheel. Both will continue to be operated by their current management.

Deno Vourderis, whose family owns the Wonder Wheel, said the Ferris wheel that opened in 1920 will be updated with solar panels on its cars and retrofitted with a lighting configuration resembling the original one.

The city bought 6.9 acres of Coney Island property in November from developer Joe Sitt for $95.6 million.

That followed years of wrangling between the city and Sitt, whose vision for Coney Island was not in line with Bloomberg’s.

Sitt, who still owns about as many Coney Island acres as the city, released a statement Tuesday saying his firm is "beyond pleased" by plans for this summer and is "looking forward to … working shoulder to shoulder with the city."

The mayor, who won a third term in November, has touted the renewal of Brooklyn beachfront as part of his political and economic agenda.

"Coney Island remains one of the most known and beloved neighborhoods around the world, but for decades its famed amusement park has dwindled to just a tiny fraction of what it once was," the mayor said.

Once dubbed the People’s Playground, the peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean drew working-class Americans for more than a century with its tacky splendor and low-cost fun.

But in recent decades, while visitors crowded the boardwalk, scarfing down fast food and letting out screams on thrill rides, life for many of Coney Island’s 65,000 residents had become a drug-fueled hell amid a double-digit unemployment rate, crumbling housing and a skyrocketing crime rate.

Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp. that spearheaded the Coney Island project, said he expects this summer’s activities to reverse "years of decline and disinvestment."

Plans are in place to turn the run-down beachfront into a 27-acre, year-round amusement and entertainment district with restaurants, movie theaters, retail stores and hotels aimed at tourists.

Officials said the park will create 330 jobs by 2011, with emphasis on local hiring. In coming years, the rest of the revival is expected to generate more than 25,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent ones, along with billions of dollars in economic activity.

The city has promised to invest about $6.5 million toward improving the neighborhood’s rotting infrastructure in preparation for building more than 5,000 housing units, including 900 affordable ones.

The May opening of Luna Park is to be toasted with a new beer called the Coney Island Luna Lager, made by the San Francisco-based Shmaltz Brewing Co.

City Councilman Domenic Recchia, who represents Coney Island, called the renewal "a dream come true."

Studio executives are drawing up schedules of popular films that will be “retro-fitted” with 3-D technology after the science fiction blockbuster, directed by James Cameron, last week became the second highest grossing movie of all time.

A 3-D version of Avatar has driven ticket sales to more than $1.14 billion (£700m) in just three weeks; only Titanic, Cameron’s 1997 epic, has made more money at the box office.

Rival studios had been waiting to see if Avatar took the 3-D experience — albeit using special glasses — beyond the popularity of animated tales such Monsters vs Aliens.

Experts now predict that 3-D will become the new multiplex standard within five years. This will be as dramatic a shift as when the “talkies” killed off silent movies in the early 20th century.

Retro-fitting a screen classic with 3-D imagery could take as little as four months, using software to manipulate a digital copy of the film.

Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings, said last spring that he wanted to reissue the trilogy in 3-D if Avatar persuaded enough cinemas to put in new 3-D projectors. Last week technicians at Weta, the production company that had worked on the trilogy, said they had experimented with 3-D battle scenes and proclaimed them to be “gob-smacking”.

The Lord of the Rings is expected to be re-released after Jackson has finished producing the two-part version of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit over the next two years. This would mean that a 3-D version of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the trilogy, could be in cinemas by Christmas 2012.

It may be beaten to the screen by a revamped version of Star Wars. George Lucas, the director, spent $13m filming the original in 1976, added special effects in 1997 and 2004, and will now spend another $10m to change it into a 3-D spectacular.

“George cannot leave it alone,” said an associate. “He is salivating at the opportunity to play with it again. This time the Death Star is really going to explode all over the audience and leave them gasping.”

Read more at the Times Online (UK).

A review from Gizmodo…

Put simply, Avatar is the most visually fantastic film I’ve ever seen. It will be hailed as the groundbreaking 3D release of its time while setting a new standard by which all blockbusters are measured. Yes, it’s that good.

I’m not going to talk about plot (or that I thought to myself, Dances with Wolves in space more than once). I’m not going to talk about dialog or pacing (or that the limited narration was totally unnecessary). There are other reviews, more reviewy type reviews, that have all that covered. I’m not going to spoil anything, either. Heck, I’m not even going to talk about Avatar…not just yet.

I want to talk about Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park was the first movie I remember being excited to an unhealthily obsessive level. My dad, a huge Michael Crichton fan, did his best to tempt my young self into reading the full-out book. So he told me a sort of good parts version, filling my head with tales of dinosaur resurrection from amber dug up deep in the Earth, all while I would do my best to get more and more out of him without actually having to crack open a book.

So when I heard Jurassic Park was becoming a movie, not only did that dash any chance of me reading the story, but I literally could not fathom a world in which I’d be patient enough to wait to see it (not that I had any other option). I mean, dinosaurs, theme parks, and terror? Jurassic Park was biologically engineered for young boys.

All of this is nice background, but my point is simpler. When I saw those dinosaurs on screen, knowing that, in many cases, they’d been modeled purely by computers—computers!—I felt like anything was possible. Yes, it’s a cliche feeling. That’s actually why I’m sharing it. Because ultimately, we all have that movie—be it Star Wars or Terminator or whatever—that movie we actually felt a bit humbled, even challenged, watching because it was was an amuse-bouche of the future, even if a bit cheesy at heart.

Avatar is that movie for the new generation.

I don’t expect you to believe me if you haven’t seen the film yet. I, myself, was a huge skeptic until a few hours ago. Blue people? Papyrus font?? What the fuck happened to dinosaurs and light sabers and killer robots from the future? Did we use all the cool stuff up?

But about 30 minutes in to the film, you realize that the marketing has undersold the movie. In an era when every great moment of a film makes its way to a trailer, Avatar surprised me with an endless amount of unparalleled optical overload. Every single shot is just so full of detail that you literally open your eyes wider to take as much in as you can before each cut.

Gizmodo readers will love the tech, especially as that about 50% of the film’s budget apparently went to rendering badass 3D curved displays and absurdly awesome cockpits. But sequences from Pandora’s woods at night…let’s just say they’re the first luminescent visual effects I’ve seen that made 1982′s Tron look like a 27-year-old movie.

Also, while shots of the Na’vi (the blue dudes) clearly deviate from a 50/50 balance between real footage and CGI depending on the scene, their body animation, even for motion capture, is unparalleled. While their faces and eyes especially can appear a tad cartoony at times, the overall effect is not done justice by YouTube trailers or that shot pasted above. Call the effect hyperreal or even unreal, but it’s certainly doesn’t look “fake.” I don’t know that I’ve ever witnessed complete humanoid models move so realistically, especially given their exposure (in both screen time and skin).

Of course, Avatar‘s 3D is the basis of my obnoxious zeal for the aesthetics. I viewed the film in a full-sized IMAX theater. And while I knew that a fair share of missiles would fly off the screen (and ZOMG the mechs look amazing), I couldn’t have expected the sheer tangibility that 3D—what I once supposed a gimmick—added to the experience. I mean, I saw textures in this film that I’ve never seen in a movie before, like wet, rubbery skin on the wildcats of Pandora that made people around me gasp more than once. There’s a more understated moment, too, when Sam Worthington shaves and you realize, wow, stubble is pretty remarkable in 3D. The jagged hairs bring a level of humanity to his character, adding something unexpectedly corporeal to what’s really a 30-foot-tall head in closeup.

So yes, 3D is more than a gimmick. The glasses are still a pain, but 3D is here to stay.

Avatar doesn’t handle this new technology perfectly, however, and I hope that other filmmakers learn from its mistakes. Especially early in the film during shots in close quarters, the direction allowed many objects to break frame (think of a person walking from one end of the screen to the other). For my untrained eyes, seeing a figure go from 2D to 3D to 2D was not only distracting, it was tiring. And the same can be said for a constantly shifting depth of field—based upon where the camera is focusing, you’ll need to figure out whether to look deep into the screen or right in front of you.

An out of focus shoulder breaking the corner of the frame is pretty much the worst implementation of 3D I could imagine. Luckily, the forest sequences that make up the majority of the film seemed to have been planned with a wider depth of field—more of the shot is in focus.

After 2 1/2 hours in the theater, I am exhausted far more than the same amount of time playing an FPS would make me, but Avatar was so remarkable that it was well-worth the work of watching it.

I still can’t imagine popping on a pair of glasses to watch the evening news after a long day of work, and I sympathized for the guy sitting beside me as he started rubbing his eyes about halfway through. As someone with a slight uncorrected astigmatism, my left eye was ready to fall out of its socket by the final climactic sequence.

But as viewers, we’ll adapt to the new tech. And as technicians, Hollywood will learn the rules of 3D as it writes them.

So for now, I’m not quite ready to see every piece of the world’s media in 3D. But Avatar? Yeah, I’ll be seeing it again…and maybe again…just in hopes of absorbing a bit more of the visual splendor.

See the original post at Fail Blog.

If the industry could only figure out how to pay for the 3-D glasses.

Complicated virtual-print-fee (VPF) agreements are in place to fund the rollout of digital hardware, enabling theaters to add the 3-D systems. But until reusable 3-D glasses come into greater use or the $1-per-pair cost for disposables is cut substantially, squabbling will continue over millions of dollars in costs tied to the extra-dimensional eyewear.

With an installed base of fewer than 1,400 domestic 3-D screens, distribution has been limited, keeping the cost of outfitting customers in the low- to mid-single-digits. But once 3-D movies start playing in 2,000 or more theaters at a time, that expense is expected to swell quickly to $10 million or more per release.

Such outlays come on top of about $15 million per picture in extra production costs tied to 3-D, as well as multimillion-dollar VPF payments. 20th Century Fox executives quietly spread the word a couple months ago that they intended to rein in their payments on glasses, but details of a new arrangement have yet to emerge.

“There is no way any studio can continue to pick up the entire cost of glasses,” said a top distribution executive at another studio. “There has to be some equitable way of figuring out how to work things out. One thing we might want to look at is using reusable glasses.”

NO CONSENSUS

Dolby is the chief proponent of reusable glasses among 3-D operators, with the more prolific vendor RealD testing reusables but for now sticking with disposable eyewear. At upward of $25 a pair, upfront costs are vastly greater with reusables — and generally fall to the theater owner — so there is no consensus on the matter.

“If you could get the cost of disposables down to, say, 35 cents or even 45 cents a pair, then it wouldn’t be a big deal,” another top distribution executive suggested.

Exhibitors suggest that distributors were quick to push theater operators to accept digital and 3-D projection and thus must accept certain related costs. One top industryite noted that the cost of glasses is much lower than the $5,000-$15,000 per 3-D system exhibitors pay to install their hardware.

“Exhibitors have invested rather significantly in 3-D technology and have not asked the distributors to fund that,” the theater circuit boss said. “The digital stuff, yes, but not the 3-D.”

Studio executives stress that exhibitors are just as likely to benefit from 3-D as distributors.

Even 3-D vendors have been drawn into the fray. A settlement is key to the successful bow of Disney’s May 29 release ‘Up” and Fox’s “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” slotted for July 1. One possibility would be to come up with a stopgap arrangement to carry the industry through the summer, while continuing to hash out a more permanent arrangement with exhibitors and vendors.

“We all have to find a way to control the costs of 3-D, but everyone who can make money from it should also share in those costs,” a top distribution executive said. “All of the majors are looking for the proper way to work with exhibition on this.”

Certainly theatrical customers — already paying an average $4 premium on 3-D movie tickets — are unlikely to embrace an additional charge for glasses. But the theater operators aren’t volunteering any near-term help to studios.

“We have not had any discussions at a formal level with Fox with regard to 3-D glasses,” Carmike chairman David Passman said Tuesday. “I’m assuming the discussions with others pre-empted the need.”

With 500 screens in operation, Carmike is the nation’s biggest 3-D exhibitor.

Mused a distribution president with a resigned sigh: “Once you pay for something, you will always have that cost. That’s just the way it is.”

via Yahoo News.