D’Accord
Conceptual design: Helen Ong (San Tai); Music and pyrotechnical design: Tony Bussman (Bugano). HF Bugano wireless PyroDigital firing – ~2300 cues
July-like temperatures lead to torrential rains in the late afternoon, threatening to dampen enthusiasm for San Tai’s display, ironically focused on the environment. However, the rains abated early evening and a few sprinkles around showtime didn’t detract from the 24C temperatures and cooperative winds.
The display had been billed to represent environment awareness and, indeed, it was announced that all of San Tai’s shells were made of recycled paper and contained biodegradable elements made out of cornstarch as well as stars and effects with lower quantities of heavy metals than is the norm.
The overarching impression of the display that I got was that it used a very large number of large calibre shells. This gave great height and brilliance to the display but this was sometimes at the cost of any harmonizing low-level effects. Barrage after barrage of magnificent shells would be fired: and magnificent they were. Saturns with double-rings; shells with two pistils and all layers changing colours twice; shells with one half of blue stars and the other half of dramatic go-getters. Many of the shells had a lot of motion and most of the shells were of complex effects, including San Tai’s signature crackle.
Some use was made of the lake, on memorable segment had the lake covered in brilliant orange flares as silver cakes and shells fired behind and above. Another segment caused the audience to cheer wildly as huge fountains just grew and grew in height. Lots of brilliant cakes, some of very wide and bright fans were used, but often we were just treated to flights of, admittedly magnificent, shells.
I was surprised a few times to see Italian-style shells such as farfelles and studatas. I wasn’t aware that such shells were manufactured in Asia. After the display, Helen Ong confirmed these had been manufactured in Italy by Benito Pagano, though she did say he has started to manufacture at San Tai’s factory in Taiwan. This could be an interesting development if Italian shells can be had at (premium) Asian shell prices.
Speaking more of the shells, I did see some interesting pattern shells forming the outlines of cats, complete with comets forming whiskers, fish, snails and some shapes that were perhaps related to Dora The Explorer. There were also many beautiful kaleidoscope shells (which Helen had called windmills in the interview). The combined colour star and go-getter shells also formed the jellyfish shapes Helen had mentioned. Indeed, as I noted, there were many shells with a lot of motion in their stars.
The soundtrack fell flat in several respects. I felt some of the songs were too long and this lead to repetitive firing that was not helped by the somewhat simplistic design – there weren’t too many sequences used that were really connected with the music. The Tibetan bells piece was interesting, but there was an odd period of darkness and it wasn’t clear if this was intentional or not. Where complete songs were not used, the sound faded out rather clumsily. And, oddly, in the last few minutes, there were various skips in the sound that sounded like a CD with bad sectors. Other aspects of the soundtrack were not exploited as well as they could have been. For example, in the Louis Armstrong “What a Wonderful World” piece, there are specific references to colours, yet the fireworks did not reflect these at all.
As for the finale, I already knew it would not be a classic finale, and that’s fine. It was still a little bit disappointing, though, as a tableaux of falling leaves shells started to build and I imagined the air would be filled with such shells as the final moments came, but it was less than I expected, leaving a slightly unsatisfactory feeling.
All in all, the large calibre and very high quality shells made up for some of the technical deficiencies, but I had expected a bit more of San Tai, especially after their Bronze-Jupiter performance in 2001.
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