At the downtown offices of Mr. X, rows of compositors and animators click away at desks surrounded by warrior shields and fantastical creatures.

Though some corners of the visual-effects studio look like a teenage boy’s bedroom, the Toronto studio is at the heart of “Hollywood North” these days.

Mr. X has credits on an impressive list of buzzed-about films this year, including Darren Aronofsky’s divisive Mother!, Malcolm D. Lee’s surprise hit Girls Trip, the Dee Rees Netflix drama Mudbound, and Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming crime film Molly’s Game.

But perhaps the crowning achievement of a major year is Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, opening in theatres this weekend. The studio worked on more than 60 minutes of the film, which tells the unlikely love story of a mute cleaning lady and a captive merman creature. Since its premiere at TIFF in September, critics have raved about The Shape of Water, a movie that “seems bound for Oscar glory,” according to the Star’s Peter Howell, with the Hollywood Reporter dubbing it a “meticulously crafted jewel.”

And it’s a jewel that’s almost entirely forged at home with a Toronto team including Mr. X.

The studio’s big year comes at a time of steady growth in the Toronto’s film and TV production industry, which surged past $2 billion last year, but is more often talked about for its tax credits than its accolades and talent. But those are on display more than ever with Mr. X, who has recent Canadian Screen Award wins and some Emmy nominations to show for it. If the buzz is right, the studio could be adding Oscar to the list next year — but don’t ask founder Dennis Berardi about that.





“Our work is one frame at a time, one second at a time, one shot at a time,” he says. “That’s how I have to think about it.”

Berardi has always put the art first in an industry that’s full of financial limitations. He started Mr. X in 2001, frustrated by the tendency of many American productions to limit effects work to “post-fix jobs” — scrubbing out Toronto road signs and removing the CN Tower — rather than bringing effects studios in at the script stage.

The Mr. X team strives to work from a script level — an approach which, though not new to some of the film world, was novel in Toronto at the time.

“We certainly shocked more than one or two producers when I said ‘No, we’re not interested,’ ” he says. “To this day I don’t get involved in a post-fix job. It’s just boring, it’s not good for the soul.”

Berardi says this year is the “culmination” of the vision he had for Mr. X almost two decades ago, to let the craft be the focus.

That craft is on tremendous display in The Shape of Water, primarily through the merman creature known as “the asset” in the film but called “Charlie” on set, a small ode to the late L.A. radio personality Arthur W. Ferguson, who went by the name Charlie Tuna on the air.

As designed by Del Toro, Legacy Effects co-founder Shane Mahan and designer-sculptor Mike Hill, the creature is portrayed by actor Doug Jones, who wore a thick body suit during filming. Mr. X was tasked with making the suit look more natural on screen and creating a fully digital version of Jones’s character for scenes the actor couldn’t perform.

“He needed to breathe water through his gills. A man in a suit can’t do that,” says Berardi.

To fully realize the actor’s work, Mr. X used a “capture station,” a white tent with cameras covering its walls, where they captured his facial expressions to “re-map” them onto the digital rendering of the character.

The studio’s work is in about half of the two-hour film, some of which takes place underwater, though the actors were never actually submerged — that’s Mr. X, too. They used an “old-school photographic technique” called “dry for wet” in which actress Sally Hawkins was suspended from a harness on a dry sound stage with projectors that mimicked refracting light. In post-production, Mr. X added ripples in Hawkins’ clothing, removed the harness wires and added floating hair to where Hawkins’ own was pinned back on set.

Berardi says the underwater scenes were a long process with a lot of experimentation, but eventually Del Toro was pleased. It’s a collaboration that has been fostered through years of work together, including 2013’s Pacific Rim and several seasons of The Strain on FX — and a relationship Del Toro hasn’t been shy about highlighting.

At TIFF in September, the director touted Toronto talent, which he swore was better — for reasons beyond tax breaks that let productions use the city as a cheaper alternative to Hollywood.

“This is not a movie that comes to Toronto for a rebate, uses the city and gets the f--- out of there,” he said at the TIFF premiere, mentioning his partnership with “the extraordinary Mr. X.”

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“It seems like there is a real special relationship between him and that studio,” says Joe Raasch, co-ordinator of Seneca College’s visual effects program, noting the success of Mr. X could be good for the whole Toronto VFX industry, which has been growing steadily for years.

With new tax credits popping up in some American jurisdictions, the studio’s success this year could bring some much needed edge to the Toronto industry. “We have to become faster and better than other jurisdictions,” says Raasch.

Mr. X’s Berardi isn’t too worried.

“It’s the quality of the crews, the passion we bring to the project,” he says. “(Del Toro) could have made this movie likely anywhere.”

He chose Toronto. While some of the Mr. X’s work on Water involved scrubbing out the CN Tower from the background — the kind of “post-fix” work Berardi’s team doesn’t thrill in — Toronto’s fingerprints remain all over the film.