Boy, sometimes my job sure is fun! Take my present gig for example. Me and my team get to rig ropes and cables and pyrotechnics all over the very distinctive architecture that makes up Toronto City Hall. This is all part of our Cavalcade of Lights performance that we are running every Saturday night for a month right in the heart of downtown Toronto. What’s the best part? We don’t do the show once but four times! Oh yeah... and we even get paid to do it.
A bit more information... Every year Toronto Special Events produces a show entitled Cavalcade of Lights for their lead up to Christmas. There is loads of great entertainment and the night ends off with a dramatic pyrotechnic show fired from the two towers of City Hall and the podium roof directly in front of the towers. This year in order to spice things up even more our show involved a dramatic rigging stunt intro featuring PyroMan. PyroMan is an illusive character who brings pyrotechnic spectacle to the darkest nights of winter. Oh, and he can bound up tall buildings and fly around too. More on that later...
The show starts with PyroMan dramatically waving a super bright hand held flare wand. He then takes off in the direction of the 320’ high east tower of City Hall. Next he is then seen scampering up the side of the building right up to the roof as pyrotechnics blow up in his wake. He runs along the rooftop spreading his pyrotechnic goodness along the roof of the east tower then he flies across the void and lands with an explosion on the west tower rooftop. No easy feat as the west tower is 280’ high and 250’ away! He then runs along that tower and ends his sequence with a dramatic pose from the NE corner of the west tower where he waves his magic pyro wand as the full-scale pyro show kicks off. From there it is a super spectacular eight minute pyro show. Fun!
Here is a video of how it all worked out:
So how did we do it? That was the really fun part. We knew what we wanted to do but it took a lot of head scratching and monkeying around to figure it out. The pyro part was easy as we have been doing that kind of thing for years. It was the stunts and rigging that took some time as that part would be truly custom. Obviously PyroMan was played by multiple characters. We had PyroMan #1 (Chriz) at the bottom who waved and then took off running. Then there was PyroMan #2 who was actually a PyroWoman (Sabrina) who ran up the side of the building. That part was tricky as she had to ascend a 320’ building in less than 30 seconds. We brainstormed everything from high-speed winches to counterbalance stunt descenders and the lot. Given that the rigging for this show had to sit out for a month in December in Canada whatever we installed had to be bombproof. We were also on a tight budget as this was really a pyro show at heart and that was where most of the money had to be spent. In the end the simplest solution proved (yet again) to be the best. We created a counterbalance system that attached to a truss that bridged from the south (audience side) of the tower to the north (back side). We rigged a pulley (head block) directly above our load (Sabrina) and another above our counterbalance on the back. What did we use for counterbalance? Sabrina’s husband Jonah of course. By tying a few sandbags to his harness we got him to weigh enough so that as he rappelled down the back side (unseen to the audience) he easily pulled Sabrina up the front. One last detail was that we added two vertical tracking cables to keep Sabrina going straight up even if there was wind and a progress capture pulley to negate the possibility of her ever falling back down. As Sabrina is a trained aerialist she was able to “sell” the dramatic “run” up the building with super-bright flares attached to her arms and legs.
PyroMan #3 (Dan / Lindsay) ran along the east tower rooftop with flares and huge mines exploding right behind him. PyroMan #4 (Ben / Matt) flies from one tower to the other. For this we created an aircraft cable zip-line. Trouble is the difference in the height of the two towers meant that our run was a steep 18 degrees (very fast for a zip line). To add to the difficulties we had to figure out how to stop our stunt performer so that he didn’t crash into our lower tripod tower or fly off the building. For this we employed a pretty tricky in line brake and a fast belay (Michael) operated from the high side. We fine tuned the crossing until we got it down to the exact nine second burn time of his flares.PyroMan #5 (Ian) runs along the west tower and the whole sequence ends with PyroMan #6 (Shane) harnessed in and standing waving flares from the very edge of a 280’ building.
It took a while to get the whole sequence to run seamlessly but by show day we pretty much had it down. The whole experience was fantastic and we all learned a lot. I really enjoy custom installs on big buildings especially when they involve theatrical, story-line based stunts and pyrotechnics. Thanks to everyone on my Circus Orange team for coming together, staying safe and making it all happen!
For more pictures from behind the scenes click HERE.
