A guy in a boat suit

One of our long-term clients is LA Music Center Opera. They were doing a production of Count Bluebeard's Castle, which calls for a rowboat, carrying two singers, to move about onstage. LA's original request was for a motorised radio-controlled boat. As much as I love trick electronics and high tech gadgets, I lobbied for an on-board operator - a guy in a boat suit. I felt it was a safer and more reliable method for fulfilling LA's needs.

A big problem with using radio-controlled products onstage, is the interfering radio waves from other electronics. Interference can cause the radio-controlled item to behave erratically. The image of the boat going out of control and heading full tilt towards the orchestra pit is not a pretty one.

Besides, stagehands are much more reliable. All you have to do is wake him up, give him a donut, and send him on his way.

To see a larger image, slide-show version, click here. or on any of the images below.

Unlike an architect, the info from a scenic designer is minimal, all I want and typically need is simply the final look of the piece of scenery.

It's my job is to figure out how to build it.

The first thing I needed were the parts to make the boat go. Everything else will be built around that. I bought the wheels, motors, controller, and batteries normally used for electric wheelchairs. Although on the pricy side, they were the ideal components; compact, strong and very reliable.

No one cares how much money you saved by buying cheaper if it doesn't work when the curtain goes up.

After selecting the components, the next step was to fit them around an operator. Here, I'm trying on the main structure which the rest of the boat will be fabricated around.

The entire lay out of the boat was an attempt to balance the aesthetic desires of the designer with the realities of all the stuff that needs to fit into the boat; motors and batteries, an operator, and the two singers. The orignal designer drawings didn't allow for all of that.

I couldn't just scale up the boat to fit - that would end up being compleatly out of proportion. Here I've got a plywood cut-out of a cross-section view. With that I'm making a judgment of how far the sides of the boat need to flare out. My instructions from Kitty, the Master Scenic Artist, were simple - "make it voluptuous."

Ok - I can do that.

It's starting to look more boat like - it's got a pointy end and a not so pointy end with some curvy bits between.

All the metal-work is done. A lot of the steel is there just to have a place to attach the wood decking and lapstrake sides. We prime all our steel work to guard against rust. Because opera scenery is so expensive, many companies rent it out over the years to other smaller companies. To that, we build to last.

I even got to use some real boat building techniques. The plywood decking on the forward section was curved in many directions, so I did a glue lamination with very thin plywood to achieve the shape.

One nice thing about our shop is we have a lot of clamps.

And here I am faking real boat building techniques.

I made a trip to the Center for Wooden boats for inspiration about the look of the lapstrake planking. The hardest part was getting both sides to match in apperance.

The gray stripe in the lower section of the bow is a piece of perforated metal sheet. This is where the operator views the world. Once the boat is painted, the audience will never see that it's a different material.

The operator is located between the two wheels on a very comfy piece of plywood. The black thing with the knob on top, in the bow, is the joystick which controled the stearing and speed.

The boat, in the story, is an old used workboat. A shiny new paint job simply wouldn't work.

What you see here is under-painting, with aging paint washes as the next step.

It's done, and ready to "ship" to Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

We take our work very seriously here at Seattle Opera Scenic Studios.