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.
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