FILM
When you fall in love with a fish man, as a mute cleaning woman does in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, some of your courtship will probably take place underwater. How to shoot those scenes, however, is a little less obvious. For most of the underwater moments, visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi chose not to film in water at all. Instead he used a technique called “dry for wet,” in which the actors act in fog. That way, Berardi says, they could be “fully clothed, articulate, and very expressive. Plus, there’s a safety concern: if we shot this underwater, we’d have had to have respirators and divers standing by.” In an empty studio space, Berardi and his team attached rigs to actors Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones,…
