Dancing with the Stars
Designed by Nikola Koletcić; FireOne Firing (unknown number of modules/cues, assisted by Eric Cardinal)
For their highly anticipated second participation in Montreal, Mirnovec were presented with a perfect summer’s evening with pleasant temperatures, light winds (in the right direction) and a very large audience.
I had been concerned during my interview with the team that they were not as prepared as I had expected and, unfortunately, it appeared my concerns were justified. Many workers were present on ramp 3 after 8pm and the only items we could see on ramp 5 were small flocks of seagulls. Nikola had explained during the interview that he had spent about a month converting the script for the show from their PyroDigit firing system to FireOne (assisted by Eric Cardinal) due to the former being used for the inauguration of the Pelješac Bridge this same week. This conversion process was also probably responsible for some confusion in my mind a to the cue-count for the display. PyroDigit scripting is “line” based where each line can have many different things happening at the same time in different modules whereas my concept of a cue is such that one cue = one e-match. Nikola said there were 8500 products and 2250 “cues” – but these were lines in the script and so the cue-count is closer to the product count. All that said, the mapping of the script lines in PyroDigit is not at all straightforward. The bitter truth was the team ran out of time to set everything up as they had to put in a huge effort to re-labeling a lot of their products and re-addressing them for the FireOne firing modules. This is one unforeseen consequence of the pandemic; the show was designed for 2020, 2 years before the bridge was due to open.
The display we saw, then was not the one that had been designed. No ramp 5 at all and quite some amount of products not set up (Nikola told me at least 150 slice cakes were still on the truck at display time). What we saw in the end was a series of 13 individual displays for each type of dance music the soundtrack represented. After the main countdown, a single 300mm shell was launched before a narration started, with neither music nor fireworks. Given my comment in 2013 (“After the initial countdown, the audience held their collective breaths in trepidation as a narration started, but with no supporting fireworks”), I think this was a mistake. Given the clarity of the theme, most of the narration was redundant and the dark skies between each segment only served to introduce a feeling of anticlimax and interruption to the flow of the display. Personally, I want to be transported on a journey for 30 minutes and get into a different zone – these interrupts break that mental flow.
The firing patterns used were very good with great one-shots, fantastic colours and very dramatic and fast-paced at times, completely filling the display area from left to right. The problem, in my opinion, was that these became repetitive and somewhat detached from the feeling of the music. There was too little interplay between ramp 3 and the shells above – often times the shell firing patterns were just repetitive volleys of albeit very good shells. The problem with the shells, though, was the repetition of the type of shells used for different musical segments – one example of this being the very good ghost shells or strobing horsetails. It’s hard to know what hadn’t been setup and what was missing from ramp 5. The music for Zorba is very well known and builds in pace, but all we got were volleys of shells, leading to another anti-climatic feeling. We did see some interesting nautical effects and low-angle firings across the lake towards the audience, but no real nautical shells per se. It’s a shame that for the Blue Danube Waltz section that “water ballet” shells were not used, rather than the nautical flares.
The finale was great and built to a dramatic gold finish to cheers from the audience and a standing ovation for the team. Despite my criticisms above, it was a very good display but we’ll never know how it was really meant to me and so this is a real shame for the Croatian team who I know worked every hour they could to put on the display we saw.