Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC, remembers the genesis of a magic moment in
the cinema rendition of the Broadway musical Rent.
The cinematographer recalls that he was standing on a stage watching
lights being rigged for a musical number.

"As a line of lamps was being pulled into position high over the stage,
I saw the most wonderful effect," he says. "There were little circles
of light in absolute blackness becoming larger and larger. They slowly
became kind of halos with a character beneath each of them. It was
abstract until the lamps reached their final positions and other lights
came up revealing the cast of Rent on stage. They
began singing‘seasons of Love.’"

Goldblatt notes that the great cinematographer Conrad Hall, ASC, dubbed
moments like that "happy accidents." That sounds simple enough, but in
reality the magic only happens if someone with the right artistic
instincts sees and seizes the opportunity.

Rent is adapted from a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award
winning musical about a group of friends living in New York’s Bohemian
East Village in the 1990s. "Chris Columbus called and told me he was
going to direct a film based on Rent," Goldblatt
says. "I hadn’t seen him since we worked on Young Sherlock
Holmes [in 1985]."

Goldblatt has earned Oscar nominations for The Prince of
Tides and Batman Forever. His other
feature film credits include The Cotton Club,
Lethal Weapon and Closer. He was
nominated for an Emmy for each of three HBO films,
Conspiracy, Path to War and
Angels in America, on which he first explored the
digital intermediate.

When Columbus indicated he’d like to shoot Rent in
widescreen, Goldblatt suggested Super 35 with a 4K DI finish. He
recommended Efilm in Los Angeles and colorist Steve Scott, his
collaborator on Angels in America, for the DI.

Rent was produced by Revolution Studios on stages
and at practical locations in New York City, New Mexico, and the San
Francisco Bay area, and on a Los Angeles backlot where houses were
designed to resemble an East Village street.

"There were only about 20 pages of dialogue in a 112-page script,"
Goldblatt says. "The music was recorded after rehearsals, before we
started shooting. Most of the Broadway cast was in the play, so they
knew the material backwards, forwards and upside-down."

Goldblatt notes that Rent was produced with a
relatively modest budget, estimated at around $40 million, on an
ambitious 60-day production schedule. He had the same camera operators,
but different assistants, gaffers and grips on the east and west
coasts. "A great crew can easily save you one to three hours a day,"
Goldblatt says. "We never shot for more than 12 hours a day, and came
in under budget."

His camera package included a couple of Panaflex Platinum bodies, 4:1
and 11:1 zooms, a Nikon 600 mm lens and a set of Primo prime lenses
ranging from 14 to 100 mm. He usually shot with a single camera, with a
second one standing by. The cameras were almost always moving.
Goldblatt used a Technocrane with a stabilized head from Chapman, which
made it possible to smoothly extend a 50-foot arm in 10 seconds while
the camera was tracking. It was also the first feature film to make use
of the new AR (Alien Revolution) Steadicam rig, which enabled the
operator to move the camera a few inches above the ground to over his
head and back while keeping the horizon level.

"We often covered entire numbers – some as long as eight minutes – in
one shot, with camera movement choreographed to the music," Goldblatt
says. "It was important to get that action in as few takes as possible
because the dances were strenuous."

Goldblatt opted to record the vast majority of scenes on Kodak Vision2
500T 5218 negative, shooting a few exterior scenes on the new Kodak
Vision2 250D 5205 daylight stock. "It’s (5218) a fast film that has the
right texture for the look we envisioned," he says.

Goldblatt says that he made no compromises while shooting in
anticipation of a DI. He recorded as much as possible on the negative
within the time constraints, knowing that if something didn’t work,
such as windows flaring too hot, it could be fixed in DI.

Reflecting the New York locale, the cast came in all shades of skin
tones. "Taye Diggs is very dark, Jesse Martin is less dark and Idina
Menzel has alabaster skin tones," Goldblatt comments. "That didn’t
affect the way we lit. It’s all about how you control the light with
scrims. [Key Grip] Charlie Saldana was always able to slip in a triple
net if he saw a need. If Idina would get too close to a source light,
he’d float a single, a double or even a feathered solid in front of the
light source."

Goldblatt used the Kodak Look Manager System to communicate with
dailies timer Adam Clark at Deluxe labs in Los Angeles. He documented
every set-up with digital stills on Canon and Nikon cameras and
manipulated the looks with a dual-processor Mac G4 desktop. All of the
monitors used to view the still images were calibrated for consistency.
"It gave everyone a true indication of our intentions for the look,"
Goldblatt says. "With this system you are manipulating color in
film-legal rather than video space. You can alter colors and density,
but the contrast has got to be there in your original photography."

Goldblatt and Columbus asked for film dailies because it gave the
creative team a sense of how the visual aesthetics were working. They
saw dailies at lunch or in the evenings along with many members of the
crew and others involved in the production.

"It was a participatory experience that was fertile ground for
discussing ideas," Goldblatt says. "I hate it when directors are
watching digital dailies that don’t accurately represent what is on the
film. They can hear the dialogue, see composition and camera movement,
but they are not seeing the look, which is incredibly important."

The edited film was scanned at 4K resolution and downresed to 1K proxy
files to speed up interactive timing. Images were projected on a
cinema-sized screen.

"I could tell Steve [Scott] to make the leaves on those trees browner
because it’s supposed to be fall in New York, and to tone down the blue
sky a bit," he says. "We’ve worked together before, so he knows my
taste and what I mean by‘a bit.’"

Corrections were applied to the 4K files used to generate masters for printing.

"That’s important because it enabled us to use the full tonal and
dynamic range of the images recorded on the negative," Goldblatt
emphasizes.

"It was always a dream to output at 4K having scanned the film in at
4K," says Goldblatt. "There is a clear advantage in using 4K scans with
no perceived loss of color information, and it was only a matter of
time before this could be realized on the film out. It was not possible
until the control software, storage and backup capacity at Efilm
reached a higher level. This has now happened and the results are
stunning. The Efilm DI now generates an ultimate data master and
delivers 50 MB of data per 35mm frame, four times the data of 2K. I was
anxious to use 4K on Rent, and when Revolution
Studios saw the film they enthusiastically agreed. It looks gorgeous,
with no hint of digital artifacts and no compromise in color space."

He notes that DI timing was a lot faster than it was on Angels
in America, partly because of advances made in software,
particularly flexibility in matting and color control. Scott explains,
"We can now use 12 secondary layers of color-correction with multiple
mattes in different shapes. We also have curve-control of colors and
luminance in both the primary and secondary layers. This enables us to
give filmmakers more options."

Goldblatt used a selection of his stills as a road map for Scott, in
addition to describing his intentions for different shots. That let the
colorist use unique articulated software tools to draw many of the
mattes around subjects before Goldblatt visited the facility. "There is
a dance scene where a woman is wearing a red dress and everyone else is
dressed in black," Scott says. "I had masks drawn around the dress, and
when Stephen came in, we enhanced the red and softened areas outside
the edges of the masks."

The timed 4K DI files were recorded directly onto three color
internegatives on a rugged Estar base. Each internegative was used to
master 1000 release prints on Kodak Vision stock. "Basically, they are
all show prints," says Goldblatt.