CenterStaging Rehearsals to be Televised, Monetized

CenterStaging Corp. in Burbank has no sales staff yet the 11 rehearsal studios are booked through the end of the year. That should give some indication of the reputation the facility on Winona Avenue has in the entertainment industry. Big name acts such as Van Halen, Tony Bennett, John Mellencamp and Tom Petty use the studios to practice for live performances, recording sessions or television appearances and do so in a professional environment that guarantees privacy from autograph seekers and paparazzi and their cameras. In past months the company has expanded the rolls of whom it serves, not limiting the space to singers and bands. Film and sitcoms actors use the rehearsal space for table readings and comedians do run-throughs of new material. “We know what kind of tea a performer drinks,” said company President and COO Paul Schmidman. “That is the kind of intimate knowledge we have.” But that doesn’t mean that those rehearsals will never be seen. Three studios at CenterStaging are rigged with 16 robotic high-definition cameras capturing the practice performances for later use on the company’s website and the new video-on-demand channel CenterStaging launched on Comcast in July. The artists use those three studios free of charge in exchange for allowing the filming. The robotic cameras glide along a railing on the walls; the microphones hang from the ceiling. With the camera operators pushing buttons in one room and the director calling the shots in another, nobody but the performers are in the studio. After about 10 minutes or so they tend to forget about the cameras, said Tommy Nast, executive vice president, business development for CenterStaging Musical Productions Inc., a subsidiary of CenterStaging Corp. “I’ve heard from the artists how much a pleasure it is to work in that environment,” Nast said. And why would these world-class performers want to let a camera in on a flubbed vocal, on off-key note, or perhaps those famed “creative differences” that cause divisions in a band? The reason is simple marketing. A clip on rehearsals.com or rehearsalsTV gives another outlet for a performer or band to promote their latest CD or drum up interest in an upcoming tour or television appearance. And, Schmidman points out, the behind-the & #377;-scenes peek at the creative process is a huge American pastime. Musical documentaries capturing the private, off-stage moments of a singer or band have been around for decades in feature-length form. The drawback with a film is that a year or two passes before it is ever seen by an audience. The Bob Dylan portrayed in the seminal documentary “Don’t Look Back” was obsolete when the film was released in 1967. The Beatles didn’t exist as a band when “Let It Be” came to theaters in 1970. What the CenterStaging website and VOD channel gives is immediacy; the performer in the here and now. A clip goes up on the website typically within two to four weeks; on the VOD channel within eight to 10 weeks. Not everything that happens in the three studios ends up for release. Performers have the final say on what clips are used. (They also share in the revenue generated by the ad-supported website and the sponsor-supported VOD channel.) There was one case of a band who argued to keep in an argument among its members, said Warren Weideman, of CenterStaging Musical Productions. The biggest benefit the performers receive at CenterStaging isn’t the free rehearsal space or the revenue sharing but the ability to show fans the hours of practice necessary before going on stage or recording a song. “We capture that hard work,” Weideman said. Disney Gets Blu The chance to interview in-person an executive from The Walt Disney Co. is such a rare opportunity that I jumped when invited, even thought it meant having to go to the Westfield Topanga Canyon shopping center on a Friday afternoon. (Maybe it was because this interview was set up by an outside public relations firm and not the Disney Corporate Non-Communications Department, from whom I am still waiting on return calls from six months ago. ) The reason for the interview was the joint Disney and Panasonic 18-city tour to promote its respective Blu-ray products – Disney its films; Panasonic its players. (There was also a Sony PS3, which plays Blu-ray discs.) The tour, which visits other high-end shopping centers across the country, demystifies high definition technology, said Lori MacPher- son, general manager of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. There are 24 million households with high definition set-ups but only half of them watch high def content, McPherson explained. So it makes good business sense that Disney wants to promote Blu-ray players in order to get more in the home so that it can sell additional titles of its films in that format. The “Magical Blu-ray Tour” comes at a time when the lines are less blurry in the entertainment industry over which high definition format the studios will embrace. Disney and four other major studios sided with Blu-ray discs; Paramount, DreamWorks and Universal Pictures with HD DVD. Only Warner Bros. Entertainment continues to release films in both. So far, Disney released 100 new and catalogue releases on the Blu-ray Disc format and is waiting for the market to get bigger before releasing more. “We want to release titles that showcase what the format can do,” MacPherson added. What a high-definition format can is show a better picture with better sound. The interactive component, however, becomes the real value-added for the viewer. A Blu-ray disc has 50 gigs of memory compared to the 8.5 gigs found on a standard DVD. So what to do with all that extra space? Well, put in interactive features like the Liar’s Dice game included in the “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” disc or the games that will be embedded in the upcoming Blu-ray releases of “Chicken Little” and “Cars.” Custom-made special feature reels are another space-filler. In 2008, Disney releases its first BD-Live disc featuring “National Treasure,” in which an internet hookup to a Blu-ray player lets viewers chat while watching the movie or access other special features. Staff Reporter Mark Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or by e-mail at [email protected] .