Saturday, November 27, 2010

Sumner Bridge Lighting 11-26-10

Every year the small town of Sumner, WA has a bridge lighting celebration the day after Thanksgiving to kick off the Christmas season, which includes a small fireworks show. This was the third year I worked on the show, I was also there in 2007 and 2008 (unfortunately I can't link to them as they were posted on my old blog that isn't around anymore). It is a small show, but it's fun and a quick way to get some pyro in the off season!


The show is five minutes and almost all 1.4G because of the small (and rather unique) site. We fire from two mirrored positions, one closer to the bridge where most of the crowd is, and one on the other side of the local library a few hundred feet away. The one element that wasn't mirrored was a 1.3G cake on the library side where we have a little more space. The rest of the show included quite a few 200g cakes (typically shot in multiples of three), 500g cakes shot in pairs, a few Thunder King type cakes, and a couple dozen 1.75" shells, including a few small salute shells.

Left - Taping 200g cakes together for stability and ematching in series.


Right - The position closer to the bridge. On the left are the shell racks, the cakes are inside a ring of fencing as a safety barrier.

The weather forecast said 100% chance of rain pretty much constantly, but we got lucky and only had some moderate rain on and off. With a show this size we didn't have to get going until noon and were practically done by 2:30pm, which was a nice luxury. The only issue we had was a faulty rail that showed continuity on cues that weren't even connected and was switched out for a different one.

The show was scheduled for 5pm, though we expected it to actually happen a little bit later so it would be darker. The event organizers, however, wanted to stick right to the schedule because they had a busy road closed for the show, so I was still walking back to my video position when it started. As a result, it wasn't as dark as it would ideally be and the first minute of my video is terrible because I was trying to record with one hand while at the same time getting out and putting on my eye and ear protection (I was only about half the distance from the product I wanted to be for the video).


Left - One of the positions after the show.

Other than firing before it was fully dark, the show looked great and just about everything went as it should. There were two cakes where the ematch didn't ignite the visco and a few shells that had their ematch leaders get blasted by lift from a neighboring shell, but other than those minor issues everything shot as planned. The finale looked great with some 500g cakes, a bunch of 200g and some salute cakes, as well as the 1.3G cake on my side.

With a show this size and a fairly large crew, we were done with cleanup in about an hour and a half. You certainly take a chance on the weather shooting this time of year, but there is something to be said for not having to wait until 10pm for dark!

Video: (Direct link 105MB .wmv)