I met with Stephen Pelkey, CEO of Atlas Pyrovision Productions (his daughter, Sarah, is the President), competing in Montreal for their fourth time, having won the Gold Jupiter in 2012 (ironically the same year that Grupo Luso competed last in Montreal).
Atlas is a real family company, with Stephen’s wife Barbara on the team, together with their daughter Katherine Potts. Family is key to the display, as Stephen said the theme was inspired by their five grandchildren (who call him PyroPapa) ages 10, 7, 4, 2 and 2 months and with the eldest Lola and Carter, present in Montreal for the show.
The Spirit of the Jungle theme came together to entertain the audience, without being just a “Disney” soundtrack, though Don Dorsey, who edited the soundtrack, has done much work for Disney. Stephen said there was a lot of back-and-forth between him and Don and it took a few weeks to hone the final version of the soundtrack. For the pyrotechnical design, Matthew Shea (who had worked with Stephen on their previous two shows in Montreal) collaborated with Stephen with the aid of VisualShowDirector. Stephen said the number of cues was “correct for the display”. By using visualization software, they removed cues where they were not needed and added ones where they were, for a final count of around 6500, which is fewer than 2012, but adapted perfectly for the music.
The display will feature 21 positions on ramp 3, plus use of the access ramps, nothing on ramp 4 and five pontoons on ramp 5 (it was Atlas that initially donated these to La Ronde back in 2003). Instead of ramp 4, Atlas are using a 100′ “Maltese tower” (there have been many videos on FaceBook recently of such structures) and this will have feature around 2000 cues along (with around 1200 in “wheels”).
Products come from many suppliers including Guilliani (Italy) for 8″, 10″ and 12″ shells (as well as others) – there will be 24 300mm shells in the display. Vulcan and Sunny (Hong Kong / China) will be present for some special shells and many of the one-shots are from Igual and Panzera, but some are mounted on a special plug-n-play system from Monnetti as well as a quick-fix system from Igual. There will be candles from Panzera (Italy), close-proximity material from NextFX (USA) as well as Lidu (China) nautical cakes. Stephen said his company is moving away from Chinese products, due to tariff fears, plus some of the European products, whilst more expensive, are much faster to install (saving setup and tear-down time). Stephen said he had been very impressed with the Monnetti system on a visit to Rome and so bought many racks. Some of these racks will be fired using the Cobra system and everything else will use 500 Pyrodigital FM-16 modules.
There will be many interesting sequences in the display, with Stephen noting there will be “an ugly amount of whistles”, to the delight of my interview compatriot, Mylène Salvas. The weather forecast looks hopeful for what promises to be a complex display!