This was a fun one for client Richfield Productions of Washington D.C. The project was entitled Tactical Patrol Craft, which was an interactive CD rom designed to teach situational protocol aboard this particular vessel.

In that having a film crew shoot on board the actual ship would have posed a security risk, we needed to replicate its bridge.

This particular ship is relatively new, so no salvage from similar vessels was available to help us recreate it; and the cost of acquiring similar instrumentation would have been astronomical. So we managed to get permission to board the ship to photograph and measure every inch of the bridge.

Then we had the photos of the instruments enlarged to their corresponding size, and built appropriate sized boxes to mount the image to.

Fortunately, very few of the instruments had to work. Those that did, we faked with a few movable parts. And a few gizmos had to light up, which was easy to simulate.

Building the compound angles for window sections, as well as building everything for fast and easy breakdown and set-up, was challenging.

In the image below, the only thing that is real is the yellow light. Even the cabinet face is a photograph mounted to a box. The wires are painted on the wall.

And nothing in the image below is real.That monitor box turned out better than the real thing. The railing is just PVC pipe

The ship's wheel was created with the help of some empty air cartridges from a pellet gun. The throttles functioned and were made out of Rolodex's and wooden dowels. The control panel in front of the throttles lit up with the help of some colored Plexiglas cubes and some creative backlighting. The compass in the upper left is real.