With the weather conditions near to perfect, this display got off to an exciting start for the compulsory five minute opening theme. A lot of good colors and nice shaped breaks including circles and butterflies were used. Also interesting were the use of shells which contained gold comet type stars which terminated in a small strobe effect with a weird noise, sort of similar to the crash of surf on a pebbled beach.
After the opening, traditional Korean music was used for much of the show and it was difficult at times to see how music and pyrotechnics were related … except for the large comet shells which were almost perfectly timed to “gong” type noises.
Part of the show included a very large Niagara Falls set piece which must have looked spectacular to the paying spectators overlooking the lake in front of the firing site.
A few shells seemed to be failures – especially one segment of the show which appeared to contain shells with whistles, except that the whistles were all but silent – later whistle shells did work. Also, one or two shells appeared to detonate in the launch tubes.
An overall impression was that there were sometimes quite long periods with not much happening or not much in the air. It is my subjective impression that this show used rather less shells than the other displays this year. In particular, the finale was very short and a lot of people around me hung around waiting for something else to happen after the end of the show – a feeling with which I could sympathize. Overall, the crowd was very quiet and this is usually a good indicator of how exciting/boring a show is.