I met with Cindy Vermeulen and John Werner, co-designers of the debut participation by Vulcan Fireworks of HongKong/China. Primarily manufacturers of consumer and display fireworks, they have been in the business for over forty years, the company being founded by Cindy’s father initially as a trading company dealing in imported Chinese fireworks. Following the handover of HongKong to China, they established their first joint venture with mainland manufacturers in the early 1990s and followed a more European style of fireworks. Then, in the late 2000s, they became addicted to entering fireworks competitions, winning 1st place in Hanover in 2009, second place at the same festival in 2010 and tying for second place in Oman in 2011. Finally, the competed in GlobalFest in Calgary last year. As manufacturers, they don’t actually shoot any shows outside of competition participation.
John Werner, though having a fine arts background, worked for one of the last consumer fireworks manufacturers in the US, Patriotic Fireworks, though lamented that living in Buffalo, where consumer fireworks are banned, he had to travel up to Canada to celebrate the 4th July. Working as a special effects designer and a chemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he teamed-up with Vulcan as a consultant around 12 years ago and has been responsible for product development, including their homologation of consumer items onto the Canadian market.
Vulcan began the design of the show just after Christmas and John and Cindy worked together solidly for 12 hours a day for two weeks on the core of the script. They both helped choose the music, but Cindy noted that she always got her say as John’s tastes are more at the Classic Rock end of the spectrum. Each song has its own feel and they tried to avoid repeating colours and effects during the show. John said they wanted to be inventive for their Montreal participation, though almost all of the products they are using are stock catalog items. The did, however, produce special 3-D “wheel slice” cakes that they assembled together into structures call “lollipops”. These contain up to 70 slices of 25-30 shots and will be used on ramp 3 as well as ramp 4 and two extensions of ramp 4 behind ramp 3. They also added a ramp 6 that runs from the ends of ramp 3 back to ramp 2 and are using five positions on ramp 5. Not content with this level of complexity, they also have a 20m long truss 35m in the air at the front of ramp 2. If that wasn’t enough, there will some special effects, never seen before in Montreal. One such effect is called a bounce comet, where a comet is fired from a pole on ramp 3 at an angle to the lake, then a second comet will be fired from lake-level to give the impression that the first comet bounced off the lake. It will be interesting to see if this effect works as expected!
They are using a Galaxis wireless firing system with around 3400 cues. John said he’s not big into precise one-shot runs, preferring the speed of assembly of slice and fan cakes, as well as their lollipops. Counting all of these, he said, gave the equivalent of over 10,000 one-shots. Other special effects are items called daffodils, which are a combination of comets and one-shots. Many of their larger shells will also have rising-tail effects, with some of them being termed pagodas. No visualization software was used, but John made extensive use of hand-drawn storyboards, several of which can be seen on their facebook page here
John also said that, given the soundtrack and the fact they have a truss 35m in the air, there will be something special in the Stairway to Heaven song. Cindy underlined that, because they are in Montreal, they wanted to something special and different. John echoed this and said that they will be using unique effects that haven’t been seen before and that people should come to La Ronde to watch their display to be entertained and see something they will never have seen before.
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