Stay Tuned
Designed by Pedro Gonçalves Concept by Vitor Machado – FireOne UltraFire firing with 190 modules and ~5500 cues
For their fifth participation in Montreal (2002 (silver Jupiter), 2005, 2008, 2012 (silver Jupiter)), Grupo Luso were fortunate to have perfect weather for their complex display, with just enough wind to disperse the smoke. The large audience had high expectations, given Luso’s reputation for creativity (a suspended ring in 2002, a dome in 2005 and “pendulums” in 2012) and were rewarded with a 20m diameter floating truss, as well as a platform on the lake near the audience for a DJ.
As expected, this was a complex display with many interesting details scattered throughout the display. As the theme was music from TV shows some structure had been created by grouping these into thematic elements. But, outside of this structure, there were inserted humorous touches, such as the run of fast horizontal gerbs across ramp three to the iconic “meep meep” sound of the roadrunner from the famous cartoon. Other elements included rotating gerbs on the circle and the tellytubbies’ symbols fired as one shots – though these weren’t as successful as the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown earlier in the show. Letter mines spelling out HEL LOO worked very well during the tellytubbies segment. Luso’s famous gold kamuro comets to blue mines forming a breaking wave sweeping across ramp 3 were employed to great effect during the Blue Planet sequence. Girandolas were used during the X-Files music and I was happy to see the flights of rockets used.
The soundtrack was extremely well edited and put together with everyone knowing at least some of the music, though there were some omissions of classic TV theme tunes (Cheers, Hawaii Five-O to name but two). The inclusion of snippets of narration as “news breaks” to the music from the BBC World News were also very well done and added to the entertainment value. However, I found the DJ section at the end of the display, though well sequenced pyrotechnically, somewhat unrelated to the theme, even though it was pointed out to me afterwards that this represented the musical guests typical of late night TV shows. The DJ looked tiny on the lake and the spot lights were used at the wrong time at one point. I would have preferred a slightly shorter display and a better balance between low and high level effects.
This was definitely a show for the audience at La Ronde, with an emphasis on creative one-shot firing patterns (which were extremely well done with perfect synchronization). I found the high-level effects were good sometimes, but lacking in other places, with too much reliance on triplets of scrambling comet shells. A site like La Ronde needs large calibre shells and this is an area Luso typically lack. For a La Ronde audience, this is less important, but I have a feeling the people off-site would have been less impressed with this display.
All criticism above aside, this was most certainly an excellent display. The soundtrack was fantastic, given the difficulty imposed by the theme and all the creative touches in the display certainly added a lot. The finale was powerful, but that lack of large calibre shells does take a little bit away. The audience definitely loved the display and gave the team a well deserved standing ovation. Most definitely a contender for a Jupiter, but there’s still some strong participants yet to shoot!
