WinterCity Show Successfully Completed

So we wrapped up the winter pyro season last night at Nathan Phillips Square with our big WinterCity show. We did this event last year as well and it always scares me a little. A large-scale pyro show outdoors fired from multiple building rooftops in Canada late January. Yikes, anything can (and usually does) go wrong.

The day before the show it was brutally cold with high winds. That would have been a deadly combo if our show had been scheduled one day earlier. For one, high wind kills proximate pyrotechnics especially when the site has such a minimal fallout zone as City Hall does. Secondly, hypothermia kills pyrotechnicians (it can). I have an awesome team who work for me at Circus Orange but in order to make a pyro show happen it involves hundreds of little 22-gauge wires that need to be twisted together on connected in various ways. These are the electric matches, or e-matches, that ignite the actual pyrotechnics. It is impossible to do this hook up work with gloves on so when it gets really, really cold you literally make one connection then put your gloves back on to warm up the fingers. You can see how this could impact efficiency during a process that is already extremely time sensitive.

The other thing about these shows is that I never really know how much work it will be on site to make it go. We design the show in our warm little office and come up with all kinds of creative ideas for elaborate layouts and new effects that we think will look amazing. This is all fine and dandy but there is really no way to know exactly how long it will take to set it all up “on the day”. Experience tells me how long it should take but then there are many wild cards like weather, technology failure, access issues, site politics and possible crew issues that have the potential to throw serious monkey wrenches into my carefully designed machine. Get two or more bad things thrown at you and a nice show experience can rapidly spiral down to what I often describe as “going to war” (not that I have been to war but I can only liken this level of stress and exertion to what I imagine war to be).

The nice thing about the City Hall site here in Toronto is that we have done close to twenty shows of this scale there between 2004 and now so I am pretty familiar with the potential problems. This means that we can push the design a little more aggressively on this site then we would on a new site that we hadn’t worked before. This is why we do things there like pyro zip-line between the two towers and rappel off with huge friggin’ backpacks loaded with explosives (in the winter).

This show was a little more experimental and I played with non-symetery. Usually I fire symmetrically from both tower rooftops and/or the podium roof below and directly in front of the towers. To be honest this was a creative way to deal with a slightly smaller budget than usual but is retrospect I am really happy to have done this experiment. I cast the towers as siblings battling for supremacy growing up. Like a movie, each had their own unique soundtrack. They each had different colors and styles of effect. Older Brother - loud, obnoxious. Younger Sister - artsy, soft, gold etc. This made the design fun and set the foundation for a very distinct show.

Show day dawned bright and sunny and best of all, no wind! It was cold (-12C) but not crazy cold. My crew was all there ready for action and we had at ‘er. No major issues during set up. A few problems with our output modules (the boxes that the e-matches hook up to that in turn attaches to the computerized firing system). The “mods” have built in batteries that run the addressing system and some of them were dead from the extreme cold. They had to be trickle charged in order to get their addresses and work. The other issue occurred twenty minutes prior to show which is always stressful. At that point I have two radios to communicate with front of house, my team and a clear-com to talk to the person calling the show. One of my mods on the east tower rooftop stopped testing. During test we run a very small current through the e-matches (not enough to set off the matches obviously) to see that the system is communicating and the matches are hooked up properly. This mod mysteriously went off-line which ment it probably would not have fired anything from that position. At the last minute we had to run a spare module up and swap it out. No big deal but this is one of the reasons why we do tests throughout the day and right up to show. If we had not caught the problem there would have been a noticeably large hole in the show. Good thing we fixed it!

All in all the show and the experience was awesome. Everyone was happy with the show and it felt good to get to paint the sky in downtown Toronto again. Happy to be inside today in the warm eating waffles and staying warm. Should have the video up soon.

The Difference Between Saying and Actually Being...

I don’t intent for this to be a place where I harp on about things that bug me but one thought that I wanted to get off my chest is what I loosely call “the difference between saying and actually being.” I come across this phenomena often as I am someone who leads a passionate, adventure filled life that often involves doing “dangerous” and different things. I do things that a lot of people don’t so it is always exciting for me when I meet someone who has similar interests, knowledge, experience etc. The trouble is that in this age of arm chair adventurers I find the quantity of people who claim to know something and those who actually do know something to be quite low. It is especially important when lives are on the line to “under promise and over deliver”.

Let’s take, for example, an aspect of my profession - rigging. I am constantly being sent resumes from folks who want to work for my company which is great (keep ‘em coming). A few years ago when I had a lot less rigging knowledge than I do today I would often be in a position of needing to hire these types of people to get jobs done. I would conduct an interview, ask a few questions, explain the work and then I would assume that this ”rigger“ had all the knowledge necessary to make the job happen. It wasn’t until a few stressful situations involving deadlines and screaming clients (no falling bodies) that I realized that my personal self classification as ”non-rigger“ was in fact a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than many of the people who claimed to be riggers. It was around that time that I started taking courses, found some terrific rigging mentors and built up my own skills and the skills of my team so that we could often do the work ourselves. I still make a point of hiring folks who are way, way smarter and more experienced than I am whenever I can in order to increase overall safety and glean even more valuable knowledge. The difference now is that I can easily see who these people with real knowledge are almost immediatly. This is really important for someone like me who flies human bodies off building roof tops. Even so I feel that it is a skill that I still need to work on and not take for granted. Gee, I wonder how many less rigging resumes I’ll get in my inbox this week?

I used rigging as an example but I can think of many more. It seems to me that the more exotic the sport or discipline the more a certain type of person wants to be associated with it. I think that is great to want to be a part of something and learn but I fear that there must be a lot of people who get hurt every year because, for whatever reason, they claim or are perceived to be more proficient at something than they really are. I, in fact spent a good deal of my younger life pretending to know a lot of things. Eventually I became a little wiser and realized that this was boring because I wasn’t actually learning anything at all. Now I go about things the opposite way. Even if I feel that I know something (or a lot of somethings) about a subject I will still go out of my way to find mentors and ask way too many questions from people I deem to have more knowledge. How else can I claw back all that time that I spent pretending to know it all myself. I’m 38 years old and I need to take any legitimate shortcuts to success that I can. I am finding that it is also a lot more fun this way!

WinterCIty Prep

So it is definitely time to get back to work now. Out big WinterCity pyro show at Toronto City Hall is this coming Friday and there is loads to do still (like blog about it...?). Like most large-scale pyro shows, we get the contract a month or so in advance. We then work like crazy to create the soundtrack and then have that signed off on by the client. Next it is a day or two of solid scripting which involves sitting in front of the computer playing short sections of the soundtrack over and over while imagining colorful explosions in the sky. You would think that this would be a lot of fun and sometimes it is but then there are other times when it doesn’t come as easily. This design process is a very delicate balance between creativity, budget, safety and what is realistically possible for the site. Sure, it would be easy if there were infinite resources and I had a small army to implement these pyrotechnic dreams. That is rarely the case so I am forced to create the very best show that I can with what I have. I often draw out the entire show in storyboard and past all the frames on a sheet of cardboard to see how it all flows. I find this helps me a lot with the overall design.

The next trick is to continue to make aspects of the show new and exciting because for me, I need to be entertained as much as my audience in order to feel good about my job. When the script is near done I invite Bryce over and we go over it with a fine tooth comb looking for possible gaps or misplaced items. Keep in mind that it is all still just a database on the computer. The computer doesn’t know the layout of City Hall or anywhere else for that matter. It just places markers for virtual pyrotechnics at points on timecode. It helps a lot to have a second brain at this point as it is really easy to get tunnel vision looking at the fields of text on the screen scroll by as the music plays. There is no visualization aspect to the software so that part of the process takes place in our heads. I can get quite animated explaining a sequence to Bryce as it plays and often add my own sound effects and passionate gestures.

We then have our finalized show so we output a script. From that we create our orders that get faxed or emailed off to our various suppliers. They call back and tell us what they have and don’t have, we make changes and lock it all in for delivery. The next few days after that are spent on my favorite aspect of the show - the paperwork. I fill out all the forms, apply for the pyro permit, line up my crew and basically spend another 3-4 days sitting in front of my computer. Once all the pre production is done I promptly forget about the show and get on with other aspects of my work, other jobs, scuba diving and ice climbing etc. All the important stuff...

Well, that was all a couple of weeks ago. Now it is time to really jump back into show mode and focus. This week is the critical week where it all has to come together. I make certain all my paperwork is in order from insurance to permits etc. We carefully track the FedEX DG (dangerous goods) shipments and hope it all gets here on time. It usually does. I’ll double check with my crew and we will start work once all the shipments arrive.

I’ll write more on the rest of the process later in the week (in all my spare time...).

Ice Climbing in Ouray Colorado

So I just returned from a 10 day trip to Ouray CO where I had an amazing time ice climbing. We started ice climbing at the very tail end of the season last year and by the time we figured out how to put all the gear on and get up something all the ice melted. Bummer! This year we figured that we would start things off right and go to the ice capital of the US. This little town of 800 had a leak in their water system 17 or so years ago and this created a small ice pitch. Some locals got savvy and they, started climbing it AND went to the hardware store, bought some plumbing and industrial shower heads and farmed some ice. Now today there are 183 ice pitches within a 10 - 20 minute walk from town and this town is at the forefront of the ice climbing scene in the US.

It was a 4:00am start New year’s Day which was tough. Particularly so because of the stupid underwear bomber and the heightened security. It took a full 3 hours to get through all the security to the gate. Whatever! They do what they do and I don’t let it stop me from having a good time... I slept pretty much the whole way to Montrose where it was a 45 minute shuttle to Ouray. Jonah and Sabrina were already there so they showed me around. The ice was spectacular! Never seen so much in one place and I couldn’t wait to get out there and climb it.

Spent the next 10 days re aquatinting myself with the water ice reality. Had some spectacular climbs and probably learned more there than I would in 2-3 years of Ontario ice climbing. Another aspect to the Ouray trip was that from January 7-10th was the 15th annual Ouray Ice Festival. During this time we climbed less but probably learned even more. Took some fantastic clinics with folks like Will Gadd and Clint Cook and had a fantastic time watching the competition.

During the festival I had the good opportunity to hook up with Will Gadd. Will had won the competition in years previous and was challenging himself in a different way this time around with an epic charity fund raiser he entitled Endless Ascent. This was a spectacularly crazy idea where he proposed to climb one pitch of ice over and over for 24 hours straight to raise money and awareness for the DZI foundation. We ran into him on the Wednesday previous to his Saturday event while he was training on a pitch of ice adjacent to where were were climbing. We were actually set up that day on the pitch that he was going to climb for his event and I can still remember how I felt climbing it just once. Obviously Will is in a whole different place with regards to experience, skill and training but I still can’t for the life of me wrap my head around how he managed to to keep climbing that near vertical pitch for 24 hours. I had to see it for myself so I volunteered to be one of his belayers. He had 23 of these over the 24 hour run. I was 1-2am and since he started at noon the previous day I really just got to see him a little over half way.

It was truly surreal up there that night. A beautiful walk through the empty ice park up to the Pick of the VIc (Will’s pitch) where the lights were up and a few folks were gathered to heckle and hoot from the bridge as Will continued to yo-yo up and down the ice. I had watched him that afternoon and his pace had barely changed after 13 hours. Amazing! As for belaying him, I assumed that he would want a nice slow lower to rest and eat up some time but no, as soon as he arrived at the top it was all business. A quick hello and then he wanted a fast drop to do it again. From 1-2 am Will progressed from lap 109 to lap 120.

I was scheduled to fly out Sunday morning before Will’s noon finish. At 7:00am waiting for the shuttle I had a few minutes so I ran back up the hill to see how he was doing. There he was, still sailing up and down that ice pitch. He had been there the whole time while I packed, slept, ate breakfast and did all that normal stuff. I tracked his progress throughout the day via my iphone and was very happy to get the twitter update that told me he succeeded in reaching his goal of climbing for 24 hours straight. The final tally was 194 pitches for a total elevation gain of something like 29,000 vertical feet. They are not sure of the actual total as they are still working it out but... who cares! It is a hell of a lot of vertical ice in a short period of time. More than many climb in a lifetime. Congratulations Will!

So Ouray Colorado was an amazing trip and a spectacular way to start off the new year. I hope to go back there again really soon!

For more pictures from this trip go HERE.