Giovanni Calabrese has been a creative thinker and hard worker all of his young life, which has enabled him to become an accomplished artist and the president of his own firm, Custom Creations, which makes a variety of props and fixtures using Styrofoam.
But the Weehawken native’s creative juices and energetic approach had never been pushed like they have been recently, when Calabrese spent hours in a Hoboken warehouse tackling his biggest creative challenge to date.
It wasn’t enough to construct a gigantic Statue of Liberty that would go on to be used by flamboyant boxer Hector “Macho” Camacho, Jr. in a recent HBO-televised bout. Or to construct the foam guardrail that was used in a recent episode of “The Sopranos,” in a scene where a young stripper was beaten to death by her boyfriend.
“She couldn’t bounce off a real guardrail,” Calabrese said last week. “We just had to make it look real.” Calabrese has also built pieces for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, made a giant candy bar for a Hershey’s TV commercial, created the talking “Tree of Learning” that is prominent at the Weehawken Free Public Library, and produced a giant slice of pizza that was used as a costume to promote a Hoboken restaurant. All masterpieces. All minor, compared to his latest creation.
Just two months ago, Calabrese received a phone call from an amusement park in Saco, Maine, called Funtown/Splashtown, which needed a structure for its latest ride, called Dragon’s Descent. The owners of the theme park were looking for a gigantic Chinese dragon that would sit at the mouth of the ride, some 30 feet in length and 19 feet in height.
Could it be done? In two months?
“No problem,” Calabrese said. “We didn’t even have a contract in place, but I was already drawing and designing. The concept for the ride was challenging enough. Making it work was even more of a challenge and getting it done in two months was another challenge. I don’t usually do work without a contract, but I felt good about this one. The second I got the phone call, I was all over it.”
Calabrese showed the owners of the theme park his mock-up sketches and drawings, telling them what he had hoped to do. Needless to say, it was easily the largest project he had ever designed or even dreamed of. “I don’t think anyone could build something bigger,” Calabrese said. “Building a project like this wasn’t intimidating. I just knew I had to do it.”
So for two months, creating this Chinese dragon became Calabrese’s obsession. Seven days a week, 18 hours a day, Calabrese and his assistant, Mike Fontana of Jersey City, were hard at work, making sure that the dragon could be finished by the end of April, as expected.
Unfortunately, Calabrese had to put other projects on the backburner.
“I just left things hanging at the shop,” Calabrese said. “I knew this was the chance of a lifetime. Eventually, the mail would get picked up and the other clients would be taken care of. The client gave us a deadline and we had to meet it. No one likes working night and day, but it had to be done.”
Calabrese had specific plans for the sculpture, featuring thousands of lights and smoke bellowing from its nose and sound effects. After all, it’s for an amusement park. There had to be a lure.
Calabrese had to make sure that the dragon would withstand tough weather, especially surviving Maine winters. He also had to make sure that all the mechanical devices would operate safely.
“There was a good amount of engineering in the project,” Calabrese said.
Because of its size, the structure could not be done all at once, so Calabrese had to strategically construct, knowing that eventually the dragon would have to be shipped to Maine. It was built in five pieces.
“The first month was nothing but hard labor,” Calabrese said. “Once we had the drawings done, then we had to get the materials, to build the wood and metal infrastructure. We stocked up blocks of Styrofoam and started cutting the necessary pieces. It’s like using a cookie cutter on all the plates. Then, we had to rough-sculpt each piece and work symmetrically, to make sure that everything matched up.”
Moved it to Hoboken
The second step was to put everything in its permanent place, which couldn’t be done in Calabrese’s Union City studio, so he had to look for a location that had at least 30-foot ceilings.
“I found a place in Hoboken that was scheduled for demolition,” Calabrese said. “I found it through JT Realty in Hoboken and it was a godsend, because it had the ceiling height, plus an overhead crane. So we were able to pick up each piece from the top and work on it from there.”
After the construction was precisely done and it had the ability to be disassembled in pieces, Calabrese and Fontana meticulously painted the dragon – every last piece.
“It was a struggle, but we got to it,” Calabrese said.
All told, Calabrese said that he used 1,800 pounds of Styrofoam for the creature that weighs approximately 2,300 pounds. The dragon features 1,986 full body scales – “I know, I counted every one of them,” Calabrese laughed – that have chiseled design and sculpted detail.
Finally, after two months, the creature was completed. The Chinese Dragon was slated to be transported to Maine last week via two 40-foot flat bed trucks.
“When it gets there, I will patch it up and work on the seams,” Calabrese said. “So it won’t look as if it is in pieces. There will be a crane on sight that will pick it up and put it into place.”
Calabrese wouldn’t divulge the cost of the project, other than it was a “big boy project, a six-figure project,” he said.
“It’s an indescribable sense of pride,” Calabrese said. “There’s a feeling of relief that it’s done and I can get back to a semi-normal life and catch up with other clients. But I think this will go a long way to show a lot of other companies that I can do the big jobs. A lot of these big companies know of me already, but this goes to help.”