Fill 1
Fill 1
November 04, 2015
In The Mix

Sea Worthy

When scripts call for ships, this company’s on board.

Libby Slate

In the January premiere episode of ABC’s Agent Carter, playboy Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), on a dockside walk with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), asks her to find out who’s framed him for selling weapons to the enemy.

He then boards a 1940s wood-paneled speedboat and zips off into the night.

The show is set in 1946 New York. In reality, the scene was filmed in San Pedro, California, and the vintage boat was supplied by Nautical Film Services (NFS).

Michael Neipris combined his background in production management for large-scale live events with his knowledge of boats and tall ships to found the company in 2003. Since then, the firm has performed marine coordination for TV, film, commercials and print projects, both contemporary and period.

Its services include location scouting, nautical historical consulting and research, nautical set design and FX, and providing such production elements as picture and camera vessels, nautical props, costumes and stunts as well as indoor and outdoor water tanks.

The fishing boat Slice of Life — used by the titular serial killer of Showtime’s Dexter to dispose of his victims’ bodies — was provided by NFS. “Fans who saw us filming on location treated the boat like it was a movie star,” Neipris recalls.

More recent gigs include staging a dinner scene aboard a docked boat for the CW’s Jane the Virgin and providing a burned boat — the aftermath of an explosion — to CBS’s Scorpion. For another CBS show, longtime client The Mentalist, Neipris had a fishing village built on a waterfront and brought boats to the Warner Bros. set for filming.

A few years before establishing NFS “by accident,” Neipris says, he had read that Steven Spielberg was making a film about a slave ship and knew he had just the right vessel for the job.

“I found the phone number for DreamWorks and called them,” he recounts. “They said, ‘How soon can you be here?’ The ship became the title character in Amistad.”

NFS, which is based in Long Beach, California, doesn’t own the equipment or employ crew members, Neipris notes, but provides everything for rental or hire.

In any event, safety is a high priority. “We’ll teach the talent how to drive the boats,” he says. “We teach them how to swim or dive. We’ve got a 100 percent safety record, which I’m very proud of.”

Of course, mishaps can happen on land as well as at sea. “We’ve seen people walking on the dock, talking on their cell phone, not paying attention,” Neipris says with a grin. “If someone falls in, we’re there to retrieve them.”

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