Believe
Designed by Jaroslaw Suzdalewicz, Sebastian Cwajna with input from other Surex team members; FireMaster 4 firing with 41 modules and 881 cues.
Grey skies didn’t turn into the showers that had been predicted and a perfect, if somewhat cool at 20C, evening was the backdrop for the debut display from the Polish team. The winds were not so cooperative, though, with smoke blowing directly at the audience.
The display was designed to capture the imagination of the audience and make them believe in the magic of fireworks and, indeed, this was immediately achieved in the opening few minutes. A very artistic use was made of runs of fans of comets on ramp 3 and candles shooting directly over the lake, giving the impression of the hands of a pianist running their fingers over the keyboard.
The first ten minutes or so of the display was captivating with good use made of all levels of the display area: lake, low-level across ramp 3 and the sky above this with good interplay between the frequent fans of comets and the shells above. Good use was also made of studatas and shell-of-shells type effects, adding to the rhythmic nature of the soundtrack. There were some interesting subtleties in the use of colours – at one point white strobes were fired over the top of red strobes, matching the colours of the Polish flag.
Unfortunately, after about 15 minutes or so, a repetitiveness in the firing patterns and material used became evident with sequences of three fans of comets below and flights of three groups of shells above. This left the viewer feeling a bit of a sense of deja-vu which wasn’t helped by the music having a similar feeling over several pieces at that point.
Things did pick up again, though, with good use of nautical effects and the decision to do two finales, one in silver and one in gold. The silver finale ended very powerfully with huge nautical shells, which would have elicited a WOW had I been writing notes! The gold finale was interesting in that it had flights of whistling girandolas, but these were difficult to see because of the direction of the smoke and also because of the very large note-synchronized mines that were fired at the same time, though the audible effect was very good. The display came to a thunderous close, though the two very large shells fired right at the end were obscured by the smoke.
The audience, once again, light in number, gave the Polish team a well deserved standing ovation. It was certainly and impressive debut display. Despite the vagueness of the theme, the display did engender the intended feeling of magic in fireworks. Some have criticized the editing of the soundtrack, claiming it was just un-cut song, but I found that it was fine – certainly the best edited of the season so far and most definitely not un-cut songs. What was also interesting was that this display had the fewest cues of any display in the past several years (since Cienfuegos in 2006 actually), but this didn’t detract from the quality of the display nor the synchronization. The key is how those cues are used, not the actual number and Surex certainly demonstrated how to make their cues effective.
At this point in the competition, Surex are in the #1 spot in my opinion, but there are some very strong contenders still ahead.