The Look: Slick Bohemia
Demonstrating that sometimes the DI is all about what you don’t notice,
the movie-musical version of Broadway hit Rent
benefits from an overall crispness. There’s no doubt that lots of
color-correction took place, with windows of enhancement nudging your
eyes this way or that, toward one singing-and-dancing character or
another, but the overall effect, supervised by Steve Scott at E-Film in
Los Angeles, is subtle. What's most apparent is how the show really
pops on screen, with crisp greens and browns springing out of perfect,
inky blacks. The picture is so clean that it throws any exhibition
flaws into sharp relief – at a press screening in New York, the
left-hand third of the screen flickered distractingly in some darker
shots, the apparent result of irregularities in that venue's 35mm
print. It proves that, while the creation of film prints is still the
raison d’etre of the DI process, they can be the
most capricious element in the whole equation.