Michael Bohonos
I met with Michael Bohonos, competing in Montreal for the second time with his company Garden City Fireworks, based in Beamsville, Ontario. Michael is a veteran of the competition, though, as he was involved with three Gold-Jupiter winning Canadian displays and has been either technical director of a team or a closing show every year since his participation in 2008.
Since his last participation, he said he traveled a lot in the pyro world and had had plenty of time to work on the theme for this year’s display, the initial idea being formulated in 2008. He said he learned a lot from that 2008 display and saw that he had made several mistakes and won’t be repeating those this time. He’d also suffered some bad luck with some special MagicFire shells which hadn’t fired. Now those problems have been resolved Michael will be using MagicFire shells for one special sequence in this show.
Michael said it’s great to be back in Montreal, but it’s also stressful as he has had some family tragedies to deal with recently as well as experiencing twice the volume of business this summer compared to last. But he said he’s well prepared for this show.
His seven year old daughter, going to school in the French system in Ontario, picked some of the music for the display so he’s dedicating it to her. The theme is the four seasons and Michael said that, as a Canadian and an outdoorsman, he’s very aware of the seasons here. Spring is fishing, summer is fireworks (of course), autumn is hunting and winter is skiing. He said the soundtrack took about one year to come into its final form. His daughter performed the narrative sections too.
On the technical side, it’s the largest show Michael has ever designed and will use 235 16-cue Pyrodigital modules as well as an extra 17 16-cue MagicFire modules. Ramp 5 will be fired wireless using PyroStudio’s equipment as well as their ISOboost product to ensure a strong signal on the other ramps. Eight field controllers (and one backup) will be used too. There will be some special set pieces, but he didn’t go into any details, except that they will be fired in the Autumn segment. Products used come from Parente, Panzera, Vincente Caballer , Zaragozana, Luso, Rozzi, Vulcan, Hands, Dancing, Next FX and RES – picking the best from each supplier. There will be 81 large calibre (8″, 10″ and 12″) shells used. No visualization software was used, Michael preferring to design using paper and his imagination, but Finale was used to prepare the site layout drawings. Of course ShowDirector was used to do the actual scripting, Michael mentioning that he finds it very easy and productive to use.
Michael said he’s proud to be representing Canada and, being a self-effacing Canadian, initially didn’t want me to mention that he’s aiming for the Gold Jupiter. But, of course, he is! The weather forecast is promising, with sunny and dry days for setup and a warm and somewhat humid day for the show itself.
