Hans Bruch jr. on the short Hearts of Stone
Hearts of Stone follows Paula, a lonely street artist who spends her time entertaining people as a living statue. She longs for an impossible love with a stone statue named Agatha. Beautifully captured in warm, colourful hues by DP Hans Bruch Jr. Hearts of Stone won Best International at LA Shorts International Film Festival and Grand Prix for Best Live Action Short at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
Director Tom Van Avermaet logically found his way to Bruch Jr. when it came to looking for a DOP to work on the film. “I don’t know how many DPs he looked at, but I hope he quite quickly decided on me,” begins Bruch Jr. “We are from the same film school generation and I remember his first short film, Droomtijd (2006) being very lauded.”
When Bruch Jr. came onboard the project, he immediately attempted to reduce the amount of shots. “We found ourselves doing overtime on a daily basis, it was a very tight schedule. We knew we would shoot in Antwerp because Tom really had his mind set on Middelheimpark with all the statues. I didn’t know it very well, but I’m glad I got to know it. Tom was inspired by that park specifically and the lot where they put all the unexposed statues together is a real thing. That wasn’t something we constructed. It’s a whole bunch of statues bundled together and it was impressive to see. Then the renovation of the dancehall was in the very centre of Antwerp and that was freshly renovated. The venue was very accommodating to guests. It really revolved around those two locations – the park and the dancehall and they fit very well together and has a very classicistic quality to them, both the interior of the hall and the statues of course. Then the apartment of the main character is actually the apartment of our producer, so that made it work budget-wise.”
Van Avermaet came very prepared to the shoot and had been working on the idea for Hearts of Stone for a long time. “We shot the film five years ago, before Covid,” says Bruch Jr. “I did lots of storyboarding. We were working with lots of photos of the locations as well and I was also reviewing the files that Tom gave to me. There was already an impressive amount storyboarded beforehand and his mood board was a little bit scary. He referenced Atonement as an example, which I think we deviated from radically, but I do remember that he was going for that as a bit of a reference. We had many conversations in Antwerp train station, as it was common ground for us and we also met in Antwerp.”
When it came to creative references, Bruch Jr. had a mood board. “I usually go for the impressionistic vibe when it comes to the pure image texturing quality. We landed on that pretty easily because it was autumn and if you look at Tom’s previous short films,they are also relatively colourful and shot in warm earthy tones. They served as an inspiration. Tom cast Jan Bijvoet in this film, which also has a warm feeling to it. I made LUTs for this one as it’s Sony and I have quite an experience with S-Log. I’ve owned more budget friendly Sony’s for the last decade to do my stuff on because you can go a lot of ways with the colour there. It was less of an issue for me to really define the colours, but you go look for them of course as you shoot. You mostly see it in the intro sequence because that’s something we shot two days after the actual shoot. That’s where we go looking for those specific patches of colours in the tree canopies and that sets the tone for the rest of the film.”
There was a little bit of flexibility in the choice of colour scheme when it came to the dancehall sequence. “That’s where it gets absolutely abundant inside the dance hall,” continues Bruch Jr. “I always had in mind what Tom had done before and I knew I could go a step further. I awoke the Vittorio Storaro in myself and said let’s go for a bunch of Italian colours. I was thinking mostly of the Dario Argento movies. I don’t know if we completely agreed on that beforehand, but I knew Tom was going to appreciate it. In the end, it is really consistent. It was also a bit of a shock seeing it again after four years and I was super happy with the results.”
The colour grading was spread across almost two years and it was done by Peter Bernaers. “It was a bit too tough for me attend, but there was complete trust, and I know Peter is also a very creative grader,” says Bruch Jr. “He’s done Mandy (2018). I remember seeing very expressive colours in that film, so I gave a lot of trust there. In the end it’s the director’s choice. I can advise and help to an initial point, but I was very happy with what it became. I also saw it again at the premiere at Ostend Film Festival and it struck me as being the more whimsical and almost extravagant compared to the other films because there was more colour, movement and music. It’s the heaviest scored film in terms of music per screen time that I’ve ever done. There are violins all over the place. I really liked it. Most European films are quite minimalistic compared to this one, so it was a lot of fun.”
Bruch Jr. captured the film with the Sony VENICE 1. “I was very intrigued by the camera after seeing a bunch of tests,” says Bruch Jr. “It’s almost blasphemous to deviate off anything ARRI these days, but Sony gives you more possibilities in post-production, which I knew was going to be very important in this case. The base ISO was also 2.5times (800 to 2500 iso) higher than an ARRI, which was going to be important for the park and it ended up being very important in the end. We pushed the base ISO a lot because we were working with just a few of those ARRI LED panels. We had power in the park which was a big help because once you have generators it messes up everything and takes so much time for the lighting crew to manage that. We basically had an hour extra of shooting time because of the possibility of the camera to go on such a high ISO. We were also shooting hawk anamorphic, and we only had two left for the B shoots.”
For the dancehall sequence, Bruch Jr. knew that they were going to be sliding around the characters. “We shot the sequence over an afternoon and night. We were running around all over the place in the dancehall. With big distances and lots of extras you always lose a lot of time and we got in a critical time. I had a lot of input from the crane guy Stijn. It was very stressful and we had around an hour before Noomi Rapace had to catch a plane. I knew she would be disappearing at a certain moment during the night, so the whole sequence was shot mainly on a dolly that was going to do parallels during the conversation in the dance sequence and the rest of it was freewheeling it a lot. It’s a hothead on a crane, with me on wheels. I really do like wheels for HiLife geared heads. It does bring a formality, it’s not mechanical, but the movements are much more structured. They are really made for panning because panning is really easy and everything gets smoothed out quite well. There’s a bit of a weight to the wheels and all of this contributed this to elegant movements. Then, of course there are freeze moments for each of the extras in the scene, which was incredibly difficult. We had to do our very best to get nice movements around the frozen images to get the sequence where it should be.”
Bruch Jr. and his team had to completely deconstruct the movements in their planning “That was on a dolly and then the fixed parts were mostly crane on dolly to give us a bit more freedom and then they cut quite well together. I clung onto a bunch of drawings for my own reference, to make sense of the orientation of the scene: the movements, the axis and to have some sort of consistency in that and the light can follow. We were a bit lucky with the light because we had a fairly limited set, but we did get all the show light from the venue locally as well. Since it had just been renovated, all the lighting fixtures were also quite new. We were lucky to able to choose from little textures of light. We went through a small selection of light textures, so our gaffer stayed in very close contact with the venue people, so we could get the very most out of it and so we could get our very expressive lighting.”
CGI was required for the film. “It took a lot of time to get the CGI right, which was mostly Jessica Barden’s eyes,” adds Bruch Jr. “All the cracks on the statues body and her eyes were CG. She could use her own eyes on set which was nice. There was also a switch of a 3D printed statue and in the actual poses she was able to take, we switched out the actress to do the CGI transformation. It’s a classic mix of many elements to confuse the viewer, as is traditionally the best recipe. You’ve got some inserts of the normal statue which is augmented and the actual actress has been frozen and worked on in the same scene and they switch back and forth, so that the mix ends up being very credible. It didn’t cost too much time in the end, which was a big advantage as well. Having our actual statue and our fake Jessica Barden was very handy. We had a stand in always which was great and it didn’t take much time. We had a special effects supervisor on set who wanted their clean plates, but it didn’t take too much time and they did a really great job. They were working from a raw image or log beforehand. There wasn’t any greenscreen at all.”
The shoot was limited to four days overall. “It was as efficiently produced as possible and it was a big contrast to Tom’s ambitions,” explains Bruch Jr. “He had been working on it for a very long time and the universe of Hearts of Stone only grew in his mind and many good ideas were added, but of course time is money, so he had to kill a lot of his darlings to get to the result of where we are. We had little time in the end. If I could have done everything on a dolly and moving about, I would have been very happy. All the music, with all the movement goes very well and is why I liked it so much. I feel like audiences did appreciate it, which I picked up from being in the audience.”
by Oliver Webb