Dennis Berardi on Creating the VFX for The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water is a fairytale and it’s a love story. With his inimitable magic, Guillermo Del Toro makes us believe in the romance between a mute government worker who falls in love with a mysterious creature. I caught up with Dennis Berardi recently in LA as he talked about creating the visual effects in the film and how his role helped us to believe in the beautiful love story and fairytale in the magical and enchanting film.

You’re no stranger to working with Guillermo, so what was the first thing he said to you about this?

It’s so funny because we were in post-production on Crimson Peak and we were nearing the end of that stage. He said to me, “I’d like you to read the script.” He didn’t want to pre-empt any of my reactions and when I read it I was blown away. When he told me he wanted to make it, I was thrilled. You had a leading man and a leading lady who was mute and you had to communicate to the audience that they’re two characters who are falling in love. You had to also break the audience’s heart. I was thrilled and Guillermo is very process driven. We started talking about how we were going to do it. What was going to be digital and special effects makeup? He told me Doug Jones was going to play the creature right off the bat and we started from there.

When you take on a project of this size, what do you storyboard and what is that whole process?

He is always sketching. Every time I see him to this day he still has a sketchbook. He usually gets his ideas down in sketch form pretty early. He shares those sketches with us. He doesn’t love to storyboard all the sequences. I previsualized some of the key sequences including the beginning of the movie and the end of the movie for a number of technical reasons. I would say Guillermo has this ability to communicate what the movie is clearly. It’s almost like he plays it back in his head and tells you what he’s seeing. He can be very specific about what he wants and his references. He told me early on that this was his love story to cinema. He toyed with the idea of shooting it in black and white but that didn’t end up happening and so he ended up shooting in color.

It was a challenge in every way. From the very beginning, Guillermo told me that he needed to make sure that the Asset, our leading man in a suit character, could act and emote in close up when he needed. He told me it would be mostly Doug Jones. If Doug couldn’t do it then it would have to be a digital version of the creature. He communicated that right up front. We immediately started working with Shane and Mike, our creature designers. I started putting it into my software and digital environment.

At one point, very early on in the process I showed Guillermo a photograph of Doug in the Legacy Effects suit and a render of our digital version of it and they were exactly the same and that’s when we knew we could do it. I didn’t realize we’d have to effect every single shot and that’s what ended up happening.

Every time you see The Asset on screen, at the very minimum we are doing microexpressions or blinks through the face. It’s those little movements whether its the movement of the brow or these gestures we do as humans every day to telegraph our emotions. Doug was doing them under the rubber but it wasn’t always coming through.

At the maximum level was mainly when he was underwater or when he was growling at the cats. Do you remember that moment when he comes face to face with the kitty?

With Pandora. I do.

That’s Doug Jones really acting in that moment in that suit, but we ended up replacing his head because Guillermo wanted spittle and little bits of water to be coming off of the gills and so that was an animated face.

We did about 55 minutes of the movie as digitally enhanced. One aspect was the creature and the other aspect was the waterworks.

When he lights up and is touching Sally’s character or even Richard’s character, talk about creating that?

The bioluminescent was an interesting effect. Guillermo wanted to have it as a multiplier of the emotional moment that Doug was portraying. When the Asset is healing or angry or expressing love, his emotions are heightened and the luminescent start to happen. It’s light underneath the skin. It was digitally achieved. We tried to use special paints and UV lights on set but we ended up with a static effect but it just didn’t work so we did it as a digital effect in post-production.

We looked at creatures that have this bioluminescent phenomenon and they’re found mainly in deep sea creatures that generate their own light. Also cuttlefish, octopus and squid have this fluttery bioluminescent glow about them so we took a lot of inspiration from that and showed Guillermo test after test.

We showed how it would shimmer, reveal off and he’s very process driven and he likes to see versions. I would show him things on a daily basis and we got to a place where we had the intensity of the bioluminescent where he liked it. We chose blue because it went with the motif of the creature design in the first place. The animation took months to crack. We used it sparingly. We only used the bioluminescent in under 40 shots.

Our biggest challenge was really to be integrated and to help with the audience’s suspension of disbelief. We’re not a big action film. It’s very subtle.

What ideas did Guillermo have with the camera to that effect?

He wanted the camera always moving. Although it was a big visual effect movie, he didn’t want the audience to feel the visual effects. So, my job and the biggest challenge was to convince an audience that this was done on camera. It was also a fairy tale at its heart. All of us in production design, costume design and Dan as the cinematographer had to find our limits as to how stylized you could get. The film does have a certain look, so as a digital artist you had to be completely integrated into that world.

I scanned every set very early on as soon as it was dressed and I’d scan it. I photographed every single texture. We had terabytes of data acquisition from the sets and locations. Having worked with him before, we knew we’d need to replicate any set in post-production in case he came up with a new shot.

What other challenges did you have aside from the bioluminescent aspect?

The waterwork was a big challenge. The film is called The Shape of Water. We discover the asset and Elisa are their true selves when they are in the water. We first meet the asset in a capsule. He’s saved in her bathtub. She’s also saved underwater. The waterwork was something I that kept me up at night. With the creature work, I had the best creature minds with Guillermo, Shane, Mike and of course Doug Jones. I felt I was part of a team and an enhancement.

The water fell on me which was scary. We opened the movie in water. We took a camera underwater and I did some research. We were never going to get the type of choreography that Guillermo wanted. He wanted the underwater grasses to be in sync with the current and have a cadence to go with the music. He choreographed the fish. That opening shot is over two minutes long. Every rock was choreographed. The first minute of the movie is a digital environment that we created at Mr. X Inc. It was the last one we finished and we finished it the day before he flew to present the film in Venice. It was touch and go for a while.

The opening minute of that movie is an all-digital creation made to look photo realistic. In our stylized world, we seamed up our virtual camera into a live action set and we do that without the audience realizing we’re transitioning into a set piece which we shot with an old school technique where we go from dry to wet. We fill the set with smoke. We had projectors above the set projecting a pattern to make it look like light rays reflecting from the surface. We hung a lot of the furniture on cables and burly special effects guys animated them up and down by hand and rope. I pinned Elisa’s hair back and we did her hair digitally because Guillermo wanted her hair to have that cadence that went with the current. We replaced her nightgown too for the same reason.

That opening shot shows the best story about modern technology.