A designer’s work is delivered by crane

From the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics to Cher’s stage show, entertainment designer Jeremy Railton has always worked on a grand scale.

He’s done set design and art direction for the Oscars, museums, movies and stage.

Now he’s working on an attraction featuring nine-story-high dancing cranes — reportedly the world’s largest animatronic figures — that will perform in Singapore but were hatched in his Venice, Calif., workshop.

“It’s funny, I don’t set out trying to do the biggest in the world, I just try and do the best,” he notes, sitting at the conference table of his Venice office during a recent interview. A nearby shelf holding four Emmys can attest to that effort. The walls are lined with pictures of a wide array of international projects.

Now 65, Railton appears elegant and at ease in a neat gray suit, his accent resonant with a lifetime spent in Africa, England and the U.S. It’s easy to picture him arriving in swinging ‘60s London and landing in the middle of the action. His credits range from a Bee Gees album cover to a Cat Stevens tour, from Cecil Beaton to Pee-wee Herman.

Railton started his own company back in 1983. After going through some permutations, it’s now called Entertainment Design Corp. and is located on Windward Circle in Venice. Appropriately, the building sits on the former location of a roller coaster. As Railton looks out the window to the circle, he muses that it could use a nice attraction.

But he’s been pretty busy on other ones. Resorts World in Sentosa Island, Singapore, a $4.9-billion tourist destination, asked him to design an extravaganza to wow its visitors. Railton surveyed the site, in the water channel between the island and mainland. Construction cranes abounded in the area. Playing with the second meaning of crane as bird, he came back to his office and drew pictures of two mechanical cranes emerging from the water, falling in love and transforming into the revered creatures, with a little help from giant LED screens on their “chests” and fountains of water resembling wings.

Making their story a reality, he sent a crew of 20 engineers to Singapore to work on the venture for the last two years and personally supervised for the past five months as a Singaporean company manufactured the 500-ton creatures. The show, which cost approximately $25 million to create, runs for nine minutes and is free to the public. It is scheduled to open on Christmas Day.

For all the technological innovation required, the artist links his latest colossal project back to his earliest memories of the birds and other wild animals he encountered as a child in then-Rhodesia. He lived on a farm four hours from the nearest town, with no running water or electricity. Ostriches, elephants and lions were frequent guests. His mother used to remind him to bring the cat food inside; “‘We don’t want the leopards on the back veranda,’” he recalls her saying.

All the puppets and model building he’s done began in his childhood days of making his own toys and creating his own scenarios. When his parents opened a nature park, he designed the master plan for the venue. He was 18 and wanted to be a farmer, but his father told his son not to join the family business. “He said, ‘No, you’re going into art. Get off the farm!’” Railton relates, laughing.

Moving to London to attend art school in 1968, he painted theater sets for money. He met everyone from the Beatles to Noel Coward and landed a gig as an assistant art director on a television movie. Next came the Christopher Isherwood adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1969. He designed the set and costumes, another first for him. Traveling to Broadway for “On the Town,” he returned west for TV’s “The Glen Campbell Show.”

Railton had always planned to go back to the farm someday, but those hopes were tragically dashed when his parents were murdered by terrorists in 1981, after Zimbabwe’s independence. Realizing he really never could go home again, he set down roots in California.

Other shows through the years included “In Living Color” and “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” the latter earning him the first of four Emmys, for art direction. He’s quick to credit Pee-wee creator Paul Reubens with the show’s vision. Or rather, he credits Pee-wee. Reubens could take ages to analyze a set, says Railton. “So I would say, ‘Let’s ask Pee-wee.’” Instantly, Reubens would morph into his character. “Pee-wee would go through the set and say, ‘That’s good, that’s good, no no no.’ Paul was very honed into that alter ego. It was fantastic.”

He art directed the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and has designed tour sets for myriad rock and stadium acts, including all of Cher’s shows for the last decade. He says the work doesn’t differ much from artist to artist; “It’s all about how to get as much as you can, folded up as small as you can.”

“Themed attractions are being built all over the world, but all of the expertise and creativity is being exported from here in Los Angeles,” Railton points out. Two new (and for now secret) projects in Macau will be manufactured here, at the scenic shops Lexington and Technifex.

Despite his accomplishments, Railton seems allergic to praise, claiming that much of his career can simply be attributed to good timing.

“I’ve had the easiest ride ever,” he says. Which reminds him, he hasn’t designed a theme park ride yet. “I’m still up for that.”

calendar@latimes.com