SYDNEY — It sounds like an LD’s nightmare: an array of cheap moving light fixtures blasting forth with flames instead of beams. But for FireDance, a display produced and created by Howard & Sons Pyrotechnics for the Vivid Festival at Sydney’s Campbells Cove in the Rocks, the flames were 100 percent intentional.
Howard & Sons experimented with a new method of flame delivery — ripping the optics out of some cheap moving head fixtures and mounting their flame heads in them instead. They used a total of 40 of their FireJets, which make use of pressurized non-toxic hydrocarbon liquid to produce jets of flame, some higher than a three-story house, all synchronized to music. The control technology is the same that Howard & Sons uses to trigger the Sydney Harbor Bridge fireworks every New Year’s Eve.
“It was pretty challenging, but now we’ve proved it can work, we will probably do it with a better quality moving head,” noted Stuart Bensley, designer and project manager of FireDance. “A Jands Vista was controlling all the flame heads and moving heads; about 160 channels of DMX to control 38 Flame heads and four moving head fixtures. We had a Vista S1 connected to an iMac and also a full redundancy system too, both running off timecode so we could swap over if needed.”
FireDance featured two different shows, alternating between each other on the 18 incendiary nights of Vivid Sydney. One show was more pop music with the firejet flames dancing to the Katy Perry hit Firework, remixed by Peewee Ferris, while the other show saw them in a choreographed balletic performance to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.
Stuart further explains that timing is extremely intricate with the FireJets and that an on and off command 15/100th of a second apart produces a completely different effect.
“That’s why the Jands Vista is so good,” he remarked. “The way the timeline works is perfect for this as you can manipulate the FireJets very quickly and accurately. Each show has thousands of cues in it and is very complicated. I did discover that programming moving lights is a hell of a lot easier than programming the flames!”
The show proved so popular, more and more show times were announced throughout the festival and ultimately approximately 260 shows were successfully staged.
“We didn’t have one technical problem and didn’t miss one show due to weather,” said Stuart.
For more information, please visit www.jandsvista.com.
