Breaking Bad’s principal DP Michael Slovis
has called his work on the show expressionistic --
that means the visuals don’t just convey
what can be seen --
they convey the feeling of a scene.
They make emotions and even ideas visible.
In this video we’re gonna look at
four of Breaking Bad’s most distinctive techniques:
wide angle shots, time lapses,
object POV shots, and wide and closed shots.
And we’re going to show how
all four of these come together
to express the show’s existential point of view.
Throughout the story, every now and then
these four techniques detach us from the action.
They make us think about how,
from the universe’s perspective,
our individual egos and struggles
are pretty small --
and there are larger cosmic forces at play,
determining our fates more than
we can ever perceive or understand.
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Breaking Bad’s love of wide shots
is partly circumstantial.
The show was shot mostly in New Mexico,
where the skyline is gloriously broad,
so wider angles make sense when the landscape
is that gorgeous and open.
But wides are also there for an emotional reason:
they give us distance from the general
emotional turmoil of the story,
by showing us the bigger picture, literally.
Getting a chance to step back
and be more impartial
is crucial in a series like Breaking Bad,
because most of the time
you’re so invested in the characters
that the show might even get hard to watch.
There are quite a lot of wides in Breaking Bad,
and different ones serve different specific
storytelling purposes.
Some add epic gravity to a scene --
because what we’re seeing is so large,
it feels like the events that are happening
are momentous, too.
Some wider shots help bookend scenes --
[Go home, Walter.]
they add a note of finality
to what we’ve just witnessed.
There’s less movement in wide
and especially in aerial shots,
so they allow us time to enjoy the composition,
like we’re watching a subtly moving painting.
Like with this aerial shot we get
after Gus murders the whole cartel.
If this shot were a painting in a museum,
it would be called “The Cartel is now History.”
Other times, the distance of a wide shot
is there to frustrate the viewer,
because it doesn’t give as much closure
and emotional access.
In this scene, the cousins are about to execute a man,
and we’re expecting a dramatic close up of the moment
when the man gets shot.
But we cut to a wide angle.
And instead of a loud blast,
all we hear is --
[Bang]
The impartial distance of the wide angle
shows the futility of all this struggle
in a big universe that doesn’t care.
So the wide angles of Breaking Bad tell us
when the stakes are high,
bookend certain scenes and frustrate
the viewer’s desire to see everything close-up.
But most of all, all of these wide shots
add a sense of impartiality
and distance to the scene.
Time-lapses do exactly what the word says --
they show time lapsing.
You watch this and you immediately get the point --
Mike and Jesse spend a really long time
in the car together.
[It's finally hitting me what the,
the plan is here.
It's to bore me to death, so,
mission accomplished because it's totally working.]
And in this case the time lapse makes it clear
that Walter and Jesse have been cooking
for at least 12 hours,
so they’re pretty engrossed.
But there’s more to it than that:
the show’s time-lapses of the open sky,
with the sun going up and coming back down,
make it feel like the universe
is just rolling along, no matter what.
The universe doesn’t give a damn
about what Jesse and Walter
are doing in that RV.
So the time-lapse takes us
out of the usual context
shaping what we think
is big and important.
It lets us experience time
from a perspective
of cosmic impartiality.
Everything that’s big in an individual life
suddenly looks insignificant in these images.
And this is striking because the images
are undermining the self-importance of the egos
and big life-changing dramas
that we’re witnessing in the story.
When Walt is getting chemo --
the world keeps spinning around him,
not really caring about what he's going through,
and this time-lapse perfectly captures
his feeling of powerlessness.
Whether the time-lapses are featuring society,
or nature and the cosmos,
the visuals are telling us
none of what we do matters
the way we think it does,
and there’s a much bigger world
going on around us
than we can really grasp.
When we see a POV shot from
the perspective of an object,
we’re often watching
something illicit --
a secret call being made,
a gun being buried,
a body being disposed of.
This is logical -- after all,
when a character is doing something wrong,
they’re probably alone
and so we couldn’t be watching them
from the perspective of another person.
But artistically, there’s more to this choice
than logic.
Because we’re watching from
a lifeless object’s perspective,
we have no agency.
We are fixed, immobile --
we don’t move, things just shift in
and out of our perspective.
Or if our perspective does get to move,
it’s only because someone picked up
the object we’re attached to,
or the object is set up to move
in a random way
that we can’t control.
So the visuals are telling us
that we the viewers
have absolutely zero impact
on what’s going to happen.
And when you feel you have no power
over your surroundings,
you might start watching in a different way --
you might stop trying as hard
to will the outcome you want
through intense emotional investment.
Instead, you'll take in the chaos and start observing
in a more dispassionate, objective manner.
So just like the wides and time-lapses,
these inanimate POV shots allow us to see things
with more cosmic distance,
in a way we can’t in our everyday lives.
And they remind us how powerless
we all are in a bigger sense --
just like that roomba vacuum,
we have almost no impact on the workings
of a larger, mysterious universe.
The Breaking Bad crew called shots like this one
wide and closed.
That means there’s something
big in the foreground,
and then something farther away
in the background wide.
Wide and closed shots combine the effects
of two categories we’ve already seen:
they have the distanced,
epic feel of the wide shots,
and the “impartial-witness” feeling
of an object POV.
And in Breaking Bad, these shots are often used
to convey a sort of “calm before the storm” feeling.
The quiet stillness makes us
feel a sense of foreboding,
and contrasts with the frantic action
that’s about follow.
A powerful example of this type of shot
is seen right after Gale Boetticher’s murder.
The kettle that was boiling after Jesse shot Gale
is now in the forefront of the shot,
So this shot is intensely ironic;
it seems to be saying,
“if only this kettle could talk.”
And shots like these also philosophically express
that despite all the chaos we’ve seen
the world hasn’t ended.
And that makes these images somehow
both comforting and unsettling.
Overall, these four types of shots
are powerful examples
of how cinematography shapes
storytelling and tone --
by making us see that what's happening
is inevitable.
They allow us, even force us,
into a degree of impartiality.
Most of the time Breaking Bad
isn’t encouraging us to detach --
we’re feeling intensely for the characters.
But then, thanks to these visual techniques,
we occasionally zoom out
from that subjective perspective
to a more god-like view.
We see that beyond the character’s struggles
there’s this huge universe
operating according to its natural laws,
no matter what happens in our story.
And the characters are operating
according to the universe’s laws, too,
even if they think they are breaking them.
Once we grasp that, it almost feels like
we’re watching Planet Earth --
we may feel sort of sorry for the animal
who’s in this predicament,
but we accept this is just how it has to be.
The characters of Breaking Bad think
they can change things about their lives,
about who they are, but we know better --
because from our vantage point we can see
that what’s happening to them
is about as inevitable
as the sun rising and setting,
or a chemical reaction running its course --
and there’s nothing we can do but watch.
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He was commissioned by Oscar-winning director
Alejandro G. Iñárritu to make a documentary
about the themes in The Revenant.
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