Dover firm creates sea sculptures for silver screen

Plant City Courier Tribune: Dover firm creates sea sculptures for silver screen
BY BARBARA ROUTEN
Special correspondent

Published: December 29, 2010

DOVER - Steve Brancati is used to making replicas of sea creatures that decorate restaurants and theme parks.

Recently, Hollywood came calling.

Brancati, owner of Ocean Creations, recently finished three weeks of building props such as shark replicas for "Dolphin Tale," being filmed in Clearwater.

The movie is based on the true, inspiring story of Winter, a tailless dolphin found in 2005 off Florida's east coast. This resident of Clearwater Marine Aquarium has become the first dolphin to wear a prosthetic tail and has become a symbol of hope, especially for children with prostheses.

The film production company needed lifelike sculptures of aquatic life and found Ocean Creations online. The company was hired to make replicas of three dolphins, five sharks, a sea turtle and a manatee.

The film, starring Morgan Freeman, Harry Connick Jr. and Ashley Judd, is expected to wrap this month and be released next fall.

For nearly 30 years, Ocean Creations has made large, authentic, fiberglass and resin sculptures of aquatic animals, wildlife, barnyard animals, even sandwiches, Brancati said.

The company's customers generally are theme parks, hotels, restaurants, mini-golf courses – whoever needs a giant mascot or eye-catcher.

The film company "wanted us to do eight weeks' worth of work in three weeks," Brancati said, "and they've been calling about every other day to check on the progress."

The roots of Brancati's business go back to 1982 when he wanted to mount the fish he caught during dive trips to the Florida Keys. He couldn't afford the going rates to have them mounted, so he started experimenting and learned how to do it himself. Eventually he began sculpting, too.

"My father and my girlfriend said I'd never be able to make a living doing it, and that challenge was all I needed," Brancati said. He built up his business, employing up to nine skilled workers two years ago.

There aren't as many orders these days, because of the current economy and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He has reduced his team to two and has diversified, selling cars as well.

He said Ocean Creations has only two major competitors: one company that makes cartoonish sculptures and a taxidermist who prepares only marine fish mounts.

In contrast, Ocean Creations offers a larger variety of products than just taxidermy and exact replicas of living things, Brancati said.

"We'll get a call from an aquarium saying they've got a prize hammerhead shark in the freezer," he said. "Or they found a dead sea turtle. They'll bring it over, frozen or not, and we put it in sand and cast a fiberglass mold from it. Then we reverse it and make a fiberglass sculpture from the mold.

"They look very real because they were real," he said.

For information or to see samples of Ocean Creations' sculptures, go to www.oceancreations.net or call Brancati at (813) 300-6931.