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A Precise Palette

By Debra Kaufman
 

Stephen Goldblatt, ASC didn't need to be convinced to try a digital intermediate (DI) on Angels in America - he was the one who suggested it, based on his experiences with the technology on HBO's Conspiracy and Path to War. "We've seen stunning progress in the DI process in the last three years," he observes. "The major challenge was that what you saw on the screen was very easy to produce, but those images didn't absolutely, accurately represent what would eventually be recorded back to film. When I first worked with the process, what we were promised was, in fact, a long way off, but now it's damned close, if not identical."

Before Angels in America got to the DI stage, Goldblatt extensively documented his work on the set with digital stills. Using a Canon G2 and later a Nikon D-100, he photo-graphed significant setups every day, downloaded them to his computer and used Adobe Photoshop tools to create the look he wanted. He then emailed those files to Martin Zeichner, the MTI/The Image Group colorist who graded the production's digital dailies. 

Zeichner says he has often suggested that cinematographers communicate with dailies colorists exactly in this way, and although a few have embraced the idea, none has done so to the degree that Goldblatt did on Angels in America. "The problem is that pictures can contain information that either takes a long time to explain verbally or can't be explained verbally at all," says Zeichner. "Having those photos really helped me to set up the dailies."

The resultant DVD dailies were "very pleasing as a whole," says Goldblatt. HBO provided the cinematographer with a high-end printer, with which he made two sets of 70 prints for each section of the film. In addition to enabling director Mike Nichols to sign off on the look, the digital prints were an excellent reference for production designer Stuart Wurtzel and visual-effects supervisor Richard Edlund, ASC.

"We all got excited about working in this fashion," says Goldblatt. "We made a closed loop. The loop is imprecise in that it's perceptual, but in the future, it might be possible to just spit out very specific color-calibration numbers that everyone can use, so there will be less room for mistakes."

Another recipient of Goldblatt's digital prints was EFilm colorist Steve Scott, whose credits include Blue Crush, Down With Love and Intolerable Cruelty. After using the Imagica scanner to create 4K files, Scott utilized the palette of tools in EFilm's proprietary DI system. He could access any of the 20 reels interactively, picking up reference frames from one reel and comparing them to images in another. He could also line up 16 images of the angel, make a change to one, and see that change made to the other 15 in real time.

"When people think of a DI, they think of color timing, but this is really more akin to compositing," says Scott. "It's the same as stacking up a number of layers, except instead of bringing in plates for your background, you bring in the same source on every layer but do different things to the elements in the image, layering them all together. And the speed is screamingly fast."

Tools in the DI suite enabled Goldblatt to enhance the look of the divinely beautiful angel (portrayed by Emma Thompson). Goldblatt is a fan of photographer George Hurrell, who developed the technique of placing a stocking across the lens and burning two little holes for the eyes, achieving a smooth skin tone without blurring the intensity of the eyes. Bringing this technique into the electronic world, Scott used the system's ability to draw irregularly shaped windows in tandem with a blurring filter which, by negating its parameters, he turned into a sharpening tool. "It's a beautiful effect," says Goldblatt. "There's the cosmetic nicety of the skin, but making the eyes sharper concentrates the image."

The filmmakers were also able to easily remove visual traces of a bad cold that Thompson suffered during the shoot. "It wasn't as if this couldn't have been done before, and it's been done optically, but we were able to do it on the fly, in-house. It didn't have to go off to a visual-effects company and lose yet another generation."

Scenes featuring foliage in New York's Washington Square Park are a vivid example of the power of a DI. Though the action is set during the autumn, the scenes were shot in high summer. "In ancient times, before this DI process, we would have had to live with it," says Goldblatt. Instead, Scott was able to key into the green foliage, generate a matte and replace it with autumnal shades. By the time the production reached the last scene, they were actually able to shoot in autumn, "but you can't tell the difference between the real fall and the one we created digitally," says Goldblatt. "It validates what we did and introduces pretty interesting possibilities in production."