I met with Cindy Vermeulen and John Werner, co-designers of the much anticipated return 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. As manufacturers, they don’t actually shoot any shows outside of competition participation and don’t have a warehouse of stock either. They have access to three factories in two different regions of China, but an explosion in the region of two of the plants (not Vulcan’s) meant that production had to be moved to the one furthest from them.
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 14 years ago and has been responsible for product development, including their homologation of consumer items onto the Canadian market.
Unfortunately, I had to ask about their debut participation in Montreal, which had had technical problems. Both John and Cindy were clearly very upset by the failure of the display – John mentioned being left feeling empty and devastated afterwards. Both said they were not expecting to be invited back to Montreal so soon and so we noted that this was a testament to the quality of the parts of the display which did had worked well.
Not wishing to dwell on the past, we moved topics to their current display. After receiving the call to participation at the end of last year, John noted it doesn’t leave much time to design and manufacture the show. As they are not a display company, they do not have anything in stock so it all has to be made to order. Production in two of their factories had stopped around Chinese New Year (end of January) as noted above, and this caused some logistical issues, but they were able to solve these. Everything in their display is from their factories and almost all of it made to order based on the script John and Cindy came up with. They noted that they argued somewhat over the theme but settled on the “On The Road Again” title. Both of them worked on the design, John noting that Cindy is much faster with the computer than he is (and also noting that he is based in the US, in Maryland, with Cindy in Hong Kong).
Both mentioned that they had learned a lot from their first participation in Montreal, particularly with respect to logistics. John said he had come up with some methods to mount cakes and other low-level items to save time in setup. John mentioned that they will be using some design aspects from the previous show that they hadn’t been able to see due to the problems. John said there would be new “sweeper” shells and cakes, new “lollipops”, candles and a lot of large shells (the largest calibre will be 10″, with 28 of these and 128 8″). Cindy also said that there were focussing on larger shells so they would max-out the tube count for 5″ and 6″ available at La Ronde.
All possible firing positions will be used including what John called ramps “6 and 7” – which are the “side arms” of ramp 3. There will be 5 pontoons forming ramp 5 and 19 positions on ramp 3. 77 Galaxis wireless firing receivers will be used for a total of 5390 cues. John said this display will be larger than their previous one and, in fact, their largest and most complex ever. It took two solid weeks of scripting to enter the design and much discussion between the two designers to finalize the soundtrack with Cindy looking forward to the last two songs and both of them stating they like large finales!