An excellent and informative report, Fred. It's interesting to note the new decreased figure of available seats as a result of the site transformations - about 132 seats less. In addition, there is a net decrease in space for those who are regularly non-ticket viewers. Overall, this may warrant a decrease in the amount of spectators at La Ronde this season. Have ticket prices gone up, in general, because of the changes to the site and subsequent space availability?
Regarding the judging regulations, they are relatively straight-forward and are still fairly identical to what they were, just with the absence of the general appreciation piece. However, it appears that there's particularly much more emphasis on synchronization and choice of music, and hence the fact that they're separated as two individual judging criteria. Choice of music itself seems to have been removed from a part of the "pyromusical concept" and added as a separate judging factor.
The general descriptions of what is expected of this year's competitors are most intriguing. I'm most particularly enamored with France's presentation since it offers and revolves around a galactic point of view. A massive supernova was recently detected by the hubble space telescope; an event for which scientists were waiting patiently for about 30 years, so this kind of opening to the competition seems rather appropriate. Furthermore, the Phoenix Space Lander craft that has landed on one of Mars's polar regions several weeks ago has also made big space news.
Montreal in the Stars seems pretty nifty!
The selected themes, in general, though seem to be very direct, and I have a feeling that there may be some difficulty in detecting the connection between the theme and the design components of some displays, such as with Portugal's or South Korea's. For the most part, all the displays look to be interesting, but I'm most notably looking forward to France, Australia, United States, Canada, Italy and Austria.
Austria's "Heaven and Hell" should have some dramatic transitions and Canada's theme around the Aurora Borealis and Australis should also be a delicate and color-rich kind of display - I've always been fascinated when studying the Northern and Southern lights and their associated intrinsic colors. The American performance sort of has an identical premise in terms of music with last year's show, though just with more diversity in soundtrack instead of just Elvis Presley songs - could be a wild show, though.
South Korea looks like it has some of my favorite genres of music, and I like their attempt at perfectly synchronizing sound and light. Australia, too, has some sweet music choices, not to mention its hyped-style kind of show! I was probably most surprised that China isn't doing so much in the way of using their lucky year (888) as part of their performance this year, especially considering that their date of presentation is very close to August 8th. Regardless, the performance looks to be a highly artistic one!
Look very much forward to the various video clips.
Just one thing that was never clear to me, though, but is there any sort of penalty given to a given participant if they go over the allocated time by, say, 2-3 minutes?
As for the weather, it's still a tricky forecast for this Saturday, not so much the day itself, but later in it. I'll be able to provide more details later today or tomorrow morning as I get newer models to work with. I suppose we've got good reason to be positive, though.
Trav.
