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Will Arnot, the show's Steadicam and B-camera operator, notes that the angel sequences required a "three-tiered camera movement where we'd be zooming to adjust the frame size, ramping the camera speed and racking focus as the angel moved. We often needed two camera assistants to pull off the shot. The first ACs would keep it in focus while the second ACs would trigger the speed ramp. In turn, that would trigger the aperture adjustment to coincide with the speed ramp." Keeping Thompson in focus as she changed position was critical. The first AC on the A team, Chris Silano, relied on a Leica Disto Range Finder to map out the coordinates. The instrument measures distance down to 1/1000 of an inch. Basically, it put a laser point on the subject and reflected back an exact distance to the camera, which helped Silano determine when to pull focus.

The flying harness was physically uncomfortable for Thompson, so Goldblatt and Nichols tried to keep her out of it as much as possible. "When we were over her shoulder [looking down at Prior in bed], she'd simply stand on a platform on another crane, which allowed us to move her slightly up or down and side to side during the shot," says the cinematographer. "We also did that for her close-ups. We made her float by just raising and lowering the crane that she was standing on and fluttering her wings. Another benefit to doing that was we didn't have to worry about wire removal later."

That didn't eliminate all the difficulties, however. "The hardest thing to do when Emma was standing on the platform was to get in between the side of her head and her wings, which were moving all the time," says A-camera operator Ray de la Motte, the only crewmember Goldblatt took with him from Los Angeles.

Another concern was smoke, which was used throughout the angel sequences. The visual-effects department was initially nervous about the effect, fearing it might be too difficult to paint wires out in the heavily backlit smoke. An offer was made to add CGI smoke later, but Goldblatt once again invoked his preference for in-camera effects. The trick was to keep the background flowing seamlessly so it looked as though the angel was really flying, even as the atmosphere continually changed due to her changing position.

Goldblatt, who generally eschews using camera filters, was particularly wary of using them in this case. "Smoke is pretty tricky to control, and with so much backlight, it could really kill you if it hit the filter," he notes. He also knew he would be taking Angels in America to a digital intermediate (DI), which would give him greater control over the final image. "The color was established to a great extent in principal photography," he is quick to point out. "I don't believe in [using] the DI to find a look; rather, it's a means of refining it."

Angels in America is filled with other innovative in-camera effects. One involves the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who seemingly walks through a hospital wall. After Cohn dies, Belize asks Lewis to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Lewis says he doesn't remember the words. As he starts to stumble through the prayer, the naturalistic light in the room changes, and Rosenberg emerges from the wall beside him, feeding him the lines. "We could have done it with greenscreen, but I wanted to do it as a physical effect and make it look as though she's emerging from the shadows," says Goldblatt. "We built a 15-foot tunnel where that portion of the wall had been, and the crew painted it black. It just looks like a shadow. The normal hospital walls are grayish-green, and I lit it so it fell off into shadow. Where it looked like it was very dark in the room, it wasn't a wall at all, it was the tunnel. Just before her line, Meryl walks into the light, and it looks like she's walking through the wall. We change the light completely so that it goes ghostly and backlit and strange as Kaddish begins."

Rosenberg coaches Lewis through Kaddish, and the scene ends with both gazing at Cohn and muttering, "You son of a bitch." The lighting then returns to normal, and Lewis comes out of his reverie, clearly confused about what has just transpired.

Rosenberg was always lit in a ghostly fashion, as were two fellow spirits (Prior's ancestors, played by Michael Gambon and Simon Callow) who visit Prior. "Meryl's makeup was whitish, and I used a low, soft light on her - China balls gelled with quarter blue," says Goldblatt. "It was an unmotivated light." For the scenes featuring the other two spirits, he gelled the China balls with yellow and red to fill in the practical candlelight flooding the room.

Goldblatt knew that a project as complicated as Angels in America would require extensive visual references, so one of his first decisions was to create a photographic diary, a digital database. "My notes weren't about what f-stop I was using," he clarifies. "They were more about what colors I was using and the mood I was trying to create. I badly needed my own very specific continuity reference, because the production was shot over a period of nine months and was very rarely in story sequence."

To help with this endeavor, HBO bought Goldblatt a Canon G-2 digital camera; he subsequently bought himself a Nikon D100 as soon as it was available. He set the cameras on low-contrast mode, which gave him the opportunity to capture more shadow detail. "I always had that camera with me, and I took stills of every significant set and setup," he remarks. In his apartment, Goldblatt installed a flat-screen Apple Cinema Display and a dual process G-4, which were top of the line at that time. "I stored the digital photographs as files on a flashcard inside the camera, and when I got back to my apartment I downloaded the flashcard into Photoshop. I manipulated the images for color, density, hue, saturation and contrast to get the exact look I wanted. I then e-mailed the images as reference for dailies, and I often printed them out on an Epson 7600 Color Printer, for which HBO paid half the cost.

"When I got the Canon, I thought those stills would merely be a color reference," he continues. "Instead, I looked at the images I'd manipulated and realized they were exactly what I wanted! I was stunned. It wasn't an approximation, it was precisely how I wanted the images to look. Here was an off-the-shelf camera that I had lucked into that had a tonal response that was very close to the film stock I was using [Vision Expression 500T 5284]."

Goldblatt worked out a system with dailies color timer Martin Zeichner. When Zeichner arrived at work, the negative of the previous day's work would be there from Technicolor. Also waiting for him were five or six images that Goldblatt had e-mailed the night before. "Martin would put my pictures up on his screen against the gray scale that we had in common, and then do his timing off the photographs," says Goldblatt.

Goldblatt wanted the film's reality-based scenes to have a very natural - and occasionally harsh - look. He lit Prior and Cohn's hospital rooms mainly with fluorescent practicals. "One of the great things about HBO is that you don't have to glamorize," he says. "You don't have to worry about the actors being made to look like 'stars' because it's not a star-driven venue. The play's the thing, and that affects how you light - you can light hard or soft."

The reality sequences posed their own challenges. One particularly strenuous Steadicam shot snakes through Joe and Harper's apartment. The shot starts off in blackness, with the sound of a door opening. Joe enters, turns on the hallway light and hangs up his coat in the hall closet. With the camera preceding him, he walks to the kitchen. The camera hinges 180 degrees so that it's behind Joe as he enters the kitchen. Harper steps into an over-the-shoulder, looking at Joe in the kitchen.