A realistic look was achieved in part through Calvache's use of a lightweight Moviecam SL. "There was not one single day of shooting when I wasn't blessing that camera," he says. "It made the whole production possible because it's so light and so compact. It's almost like a 16mm camera. I also decided to go with that camera all the way I had considered getting one lightweight camera for the handheld work and one regular camera for the rest of the film, but the good thing about this camera is that you can use an adapter for 1,000' magazines if you want. It's perfect for all kinds of work."
Calvache also opted to employ Kodak's 5279 Vision 500T throughout Broken Vessels, rating the stock at a 320 ASA. He says, "Normally, I would use the higher-speed film stock for night exteriors and interiors, and 93 an emulsion with a finer grain for the rest. But I decided to stick with the 5279 to help create a unity of style."
Using this single stock helped the cinematographer in the many situations during which a scene shifted from an afternoon to evening setting. "That can be a problem," the cinematographer says. "I would have had to either start pushing the film or switching stocks, and that's something I didn't want to deal with in Broken Vessels. I did push the film for tests, but it became too grainy, and the blacks shifted toward blue. Pushing the stock one stop seemed okay, but if we went beyond that the images would become too muddy and dirty."
To depict the aftereffects of Tom and Jimmy's liberal indulgence in heroin, Calvache chose "to be more straightforward in the sense of not feeling that the camera suddenly becomes dizzy and high with the characters. We wanted to show the characters from a realistic point of view, but at the same time communicate some of what they were going through. I used Otto Nemenz's Swing-and-Tilt lenses, some dutch angles and time-lapse photography, being careful not to let the overall approach become excessive."
Calvache also deployed the Swing-and-Tilt lenses to vary shots of Tom and Jimmy inside the ambulance. "The lens is mounted on bellows, so it's like a large-format view camera used in still photography in which you can control the depth of field by tilting and/or swinging the lens," comments Calvache. "I used it inside the ambulance when I wanted to isolate one character from his environment. The challenge in working with such narrow depth of field is doubled when using Swing-and-Tilt lenses, since the focus is not only affected by the distance from the subject to the camera, but also by its position in the frame. Even if the subject doesn't move, you have to pull focus as you pan or tilt the camera. You can imagine how helpless the first A.C. feels. When shooting for the large screen, it's also scary to have the whole image out of focus except for one piece of a face an eye or a mouth so I tried to be extremely careful. As it turned out, I was very happy with the results."
Several of the ambulance interiors were shot handheld; fortunately, the Moviecam's small size and slight poundage enabled Calvache to move around the characters in the tight space, but he still had to be particularly inventive to avoid any sense of repetition. "We always looked for a different angle," he says, "but always with the intention of not becoming self-aware."
For the ambulance driving scenes, Calavache only had one day of access to a camera car, so for the remaining sequences he had gaffer Julio Ribeyro rig an entire lighting system specifically for the ambulance. "He used a power converter out of the battery of the ambulance and he built an electric infrastructure with cables along the inside and outside of the ambulance. For the inside, we would use Kino Flos, and through the windshield some small HMIs, up to 575 watts. These were the only lights we could use with the car's battery." For the night driving scenes, Ribeyro and key grip Christian Staab also fashioned a rig on top of the ambulance. "We had lights outside the windows, and we would re-create the passing lights with dimmers," he explains. "I had my whole crew on the camera car with one dimmer in each hand." In this way, Calvache orchestrated the rising and falling lights to match the passing lights from other cars and from practical street lights.
While shooting daytime driving scenes, Calvache used the reflections of the buildings playing on the ambulance windows. Weeks later, the filmmakers captured documentary footage from an actual ambulance making its daily rounds. "We got shots handheld from the passenger seat going at high speed through the red traffic lights, or of the traffic pulling to our side and people waiting for us on the sidewalk from real ambulance calls. And we had to match this real documentary footage with the scenes we had previously shot in our documentary style approach, so 'the whole' would read as one and real."
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