Hungarians in the Big world Evolution of the Hungarian Music Culture!
Designed by Anikó Tóthné Seres, Soundtrack by Ferenc Tóth; Galaxis firing with 80 modules and ~6000 cues.
A pleasantly cool summer’s evening was the backdrop for the Hungarian team’s debut display in Montreal, though, unfortunately, the light winds were not always in a good direction, leading to a murkiness in the early part of the program as smoke made its way directly to the audience.
It was evident that a complex setup had been achieved, though not quite everything that was described in the interview was actually present on site. I had the feeling when I conducted the interview that the team were being very ambitious. Five days of setup sounds like a lot in theory, but it goes fast. Indeed, even an hour before showtime, workers could be seen on ramp two finalizing the installation of what had promised to be three towers, but turned out to be two. Two large set pieces which Ferenc had said he might include, if there was time, were not there. All that said, the lake did have the promised five large pontoons and two columns of 15 smaller ones, extending from the ends of ramp three perpendicular to the audience and linking up to the row of larger ones.
As the display began, it became very quickly evident that all of the pyrotechnic material used was of very high quality with vivid colours, long burn-times and complex and varied effects, in stark contrast to the previous Mexican entrant. Despite the wind direction and early smoke in the display, it was still vivid and bright. Various special effects were used during the display. During the Sound of Music piece “letter mines” were used to highlight the Do Re Mi lyric. Other special effects included note-synchronized flashpots; sequenced flights of stars from ramp 3 making patterns, including the “69” in the Summer of ’69 Bryan Adams song as well as pattern shells with colour changing stars.
The extensions to ramp 3, formed of two columns of 15 pontoons added and interesting extra dimension to the display, but also some constraints as it appeared that most of the low-level action was contained within these boundaries. We have definitely had visually wider displays in the past, but these extra pontoons still added a certain depth to the display. The two towers were not used so many times during the display and, due to their distance from the audience, did not add as much as might be expected. To be effective I would think they would need to be at least 3x higher – which is really impractical.
The soundtrack was excellent and very well edited. The only negatives were that sometimes the fireworks would stop before the music. It was clear that pauses between pieces had been deliberately added and these were effective at allowing the smoke to clear – just that in a couple of places they were perhaps slightly too long (at least it felt that way when the fireworks stopped before the music). The synchronization with the music was very good throughout – with lots of note-synchronized effects and runs of one-shots complementing the music very well and there was a great variety of intensity and pace. The Hungarian Folk Song “Spring Wind”, done largely in gerbs and one-shots on the pontoons and ramp 3, with support from the towers was one of the stand-out segments.
Note must be made, again, of the very high quality of all the products used. Shells with two pistils, all colour-changing. I think I counted up to 5 or 6 colour changes in some of the largest shells. Lots of really good farfalles and studatas as well as colour changing horsetail shells. Even the dim gold effects were bright and sky-filling, enveloping the whole site and trailing to the lake. One small criticism, though, sometimes there were two many different levels of effects/shells at the same time and this lead to some of the really beautiful large shells being hidden by lower-level ones, leading the display to appear less “clean” design-wise than it could have been. As the shells were particularly good, this was a shame sometimes.
During the interview, Ferenc told me he had dreamed of coming to Montreal for more than 20 years, but that his company had to learn to “pull up their trousers” first. I think they certainly achieved a very high quality display indeed, especially given their debutante status. I think they also learned that the site is bigger on the ground than it is on paper and that they really had to work very hard to get everything assembled. The end result was definitely worth the efforts of the team and the audience gave them a well deserved standing ovation afterwards. They have set the bar really high and are definitely a contented for a podium position.