Nova Scotia's Scott Hamilton has guts of steel. From work in the morgue to assisting police with evidence collection, the young effects-master has experienced the dark side of human nature. The self-taught Hamilton brings a bevy of gruesome experience to his passion - recreating the horrible.

Most recently, Hamilton has been involved on the Discovery Channel series Exhibit 'A' - The Secrets of Forensic Science (produced by Robert Sandler for Kensington Communications and Creative Anarchy) and the tv movies that introduced Salter Street's Lexx: The Dark Zone on Citytv and Space: The Imagination Station.

Basic to his company philosophy is this edict: "You don't know what real looks like until you see the real thing." This is especially true for Hamilton's specialties: surgical simulations and crime scene reproductions.

One might expect such a business to be conducted from a dark lab or a dank basement studio. Quite the contrary: Hamilton speaks to Playback from an upbeat, sun-shiny warehouse space he shares with a glass blower, a clothing designer and a ceramic artist.

Despite the contradictory vibrations, there is a strange harmony between all the artists in the space. In fact, during the interview, Hamilton offers the glass blower a job creating an over-sized martini glass.

In this unusual atmosphere, Hamilton runs his company, g.u.t. fx. Besides describing what turns over when examining Hamilton's portfolio, g.u.t. stands for Grand Unified Theories. Hamilton explains: "It's inspired by Albert Einstein's quest for the singular mathematical equation to describe reality."

At g.u.t., Hamilton strives for ultra-realism by taking a subtle approach to his effects work.

"What I've found is that people expect a Dawn of the Dead blood and guts rampage," he says. "But when you show them a real bullet hole - it's not as glamorous, glossy or bloody - but it's infinitely more disturbing. And my mission is to put a very uncomfortable bent on it. It shouldn't be a thrill or a positive.

"It's like the great horror movie The Thing," he continues. "There are all these heads splitting in half and organs spraying everywhere. That doesn't bother you. It's when they take a blood sample by slicing a guy's thumb with an exacto-knife. Everybody squirms. Something really subtle can be way more frightening than the big, screaming blood and guts stab-in-the-chest shot. Sometimes the drip, drip, drip on the floor is more chilling. Hitchcock was right."

g.u.t. had a chance to flex its philosophy on Exhibit 'A' - The Secrets of Forensic Science. Hamilton grows excited when talking about the experience.

"They were all real cases that we were creating. So we had access to all the police photography. We'd stand on the spot where the gun was fired with the [real] gun. [Then] we'd click the trigger and recycle the cartridge so the shell fell out on the floor where it fell in the real thing."

From there, Hamilton explains, he and his team would "draw a line from the barrel of the gun to the guy's chest. That's where he got hit. It hit his sixth rib and bounced at a 16-degree angle. Then you have the blood splatter exactly where it happened."

"A taste for it"

Hamilton is particularly proud of reactions he gets from cops and pathologists, who he says, walked through the Exhibit 'A' set saying, "I was here. I was here, man. You did it!"

Compliments from people who work in morgues and criminal pathologists are especially thrilling for Hamilton: "A psychological profiler said I had a real taste for it," Hamilton recounts with a smile.

"When a producer, director or art director says they're really happy - that's when I can go to sleep. But it's even better when a cop or forensic pathologist says, 'That's the stuff, man' - because they know the footprints of crime. The footprints of death."

Hamilton, the sole proprietor of g.u.t., has only walked in the footprints of business for about a year. However, before creating the legal structure of the company, he was still working on his passion.

"I started when I was eleven-and-a-half years old. I made a plasticine skull when I was home sick from school one day. Up until about a year ago, it was just me and a bench. The business grew up around me. [Eventually], I realized - man, I've got to get an accountant. This is crazy. I'm not a guy at a bench anymore. I'm a company now."

The effects shop did not start off by creating death scenes for Exhibit 'A' or designing effects for Lexx but rather took off when Hamilton was approached by doctors looking to make artificial blood compounds for transfusion training.

It was a challenge Hamilton relished.

"They'd been to two different effects houses to see what blood was available," he explains. "They looked at what was on the shelf and they just weren't happy with any of it. We, [however], make 15 kinds of blood. Because every situation calls for a different color, a different consistency, and a different thickness."

According to Hamilton, there are misconceptions surrounding blood preparation. "Blood is not a translucent liquid. It's solid particles suspended in a fluid. It's not a homogenous substance. I started with that idea of using particular pigments instead of fluid pigments. And blood is opaque. So those little subtleties of getting the blood right was really big for me. It certainly made me valuable to these medical professionals," he says, adding: "They bought 50 gallons of blood over two years."

It's clear that one has to be a bit of a chemist in the fx business and Hamilton is no different.

"I'm a junior industrial chemist. This is a business where I have discovered I should have paid attention in Grade 10 math. [For example], you can tell how much silicone you have left in your jug by measuring the height and circumference of the container. I don't have to weigh it. And I've had to go back to the old math books."