How The Shape of Water’s visual effects turned a merman into a romantic lead

New-school computer artistry and old-school makeup effects combine to create a timeless creature

Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, The Shape of Water, contains many of the director’s hallmarks: it’s a meticulously rendered fairy tale about outsiders and misfits, it’s obsessed with ghosts of the past, and it puts a marvelous movie monster front and center. But The Shape of Water is also a romance, which presented a particularly unique challenge for the filmmaker and his collaborators. Design-wise, the merman who serves as the film’s romantic lead is a clear riff on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but over the course of the film, he and the film’s mute protagonist, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) fall in love and even have sex, which required a level of performance and relatability from the creature for the movie to work at all.

To realize the monster, del Toro relied on a combination of practical effects and computer-generated imagery. Actor Doug Jones, who has made a career out of playing memorable creatures under layers of makeup — he was the Pale Man demon from Pan’s Labyrinth, as well as Abe Sapien in Hellboy — was cast in the role of the amphibian man. Outfitted with a full-body prosthetic suit, he played scenes with Hawkins during photography. The team at visual effects house Mr. X then augmented that footage with digital effects to add additional nuance and performance to truly bring the character to life.

I jumped on the phone with digital effects supervisor Trey Harrell to talk about his work on the film, how gills became an important tool in conveying the creature’s emotional state, and the magic and beauty of shooting underwater sequences without a drop of liquid.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“THERE WAS A LEVEL OF DEVOTION TO THIS PARTICULAR SHOW THAT I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Photo by Kerry Hayes / 20th Century Fox
MICHAEL SHANNON EXPLAINS HOW HIS NAME BECAME A SLANG TERM ON THE SHAPE OF WATER SHOOT
Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“THERE WAS A LEVEL OF DEVOTION TO THIS PARTICULAR SHOW THAT I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Photo by Kerry Hayes / 20th Century Fox
MICHAEL SHANNON EXPLAINS HOW HIS NAME BECAME A SLANG TERM ON THE SHAPE OF WATER SHOOT
Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“THERE WAS A LEVEL OF DEVOTION TO THIS PARTICULAR SHOW THAT I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Photo by Kerry Hayes / 20th Century Fox
MICHAEL SHANNON EXPLAINS HOW HIS NAME BECAME A SLANG TERM ON THE SHAPE OF WATER SHOOT
Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“THERE WAS A LEVEL OF DEVOTION TO THIS PARTICULAR SHOW THAT I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Photo by Kerry Hayes / 20th Century Fox
MICHAEL SHANNON EXPLAINS HOW HIS NAME BECAME A SLANG TERM ON THE SHAPE OF WATER SHOOT
Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“THERE WAS A LEVEL OF DEVOTION TO THIS PARTICULAR SHOW THAT I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Photo by Kerry Hayes / 20th Century Fox
MICHAEL SHANNON EXPLAINS HOW HIS NAME BECAME A SLANG TERM ON THE SHAPE OF WATER SHOOT
Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

LuisAlberto/Primordus