Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Renn Fayre Fireworks 2014

Time for the annual Renn Fayre fireworks at Reed College! This is the seventh year I've done the show now, which makes me feel a little old, but I'm glad I can call it a fairly solid tradition at this point. Setup was the same as previous years, with e-fire, five positions, mostly 1.4G cakes, around 100 1.75" 1.4G shells and mines, and three 1.3G cakes. The big change this year was the weather, with light to moderate rain for around 7 of the 11 hours we were at the site. We covered everything with plastic sheets, which created rather disconcerting puddles of water suspended between the cakes. I was pleasantly surprised during the show when nearly everything fired with no issues, especially given the high failure rate we had as a result of heavy rain during setup in 2009.

The music this year was all from a band I've been listening to a lot lately (and who are fantastic live by the way), And So I Watch You From Afar. The name might sound a little emo, but true to my usual music choices, they are a post-rock/math-rock band that plays very energetic and upbeat music that gets pretty heavy at times, though I avoided most of their heavier stuff. I did some sloppy editing to shorten some tracks, but the songs I used were Set Guitars to Kill, A Little Bit of Solidarity Goes a Long Way, 7 Billion People All Alive at Once, BEAUTIFULUNIVERSEMASTERCHAMPION, and a little bit of Eunoia crossing into Big Thinks Do Remarkable. I pick the music as much for myself as for the audience (I have to listen to it many times while scripting the show after all) but I was happy with it and it seemed pretty well-received.

The show itself was a bit smokier than usual due to the moisture in the air and limited wind, but I was very happy with it overall. Timing wasn't super tight, but things largely ended when they were supposed to, there was very little dark sky, the product firing generally matched the pace of the music as intended, and most of the product looked great. I ended up having more product to use than I originally expected and added in pairs of 200g cakes in a number of places for added intensity, as well as using three 500g in places where I might have used two previously. I think it worked out overall, but with 200g made some sections look a bit more sky-pukey than I might have liked. I considered adding another three minute song to the show, but felt like things would have been stretched a little too thin that way. Ideally I'd have another 100-200 feet to spread out across the field and create more separation in the sky, but we have to work with the space available.


The standout cake for me was probably World Class Honey Badger, but some United Pyro 200g I hadn't used before impressed me as well, notably Crossfire, High Stakes, Meow, and Zombie Clown. On the 500g side I added a number of big breaking cakes like Midnight Sunburn, Galaxy Burster, Muy Caliente, and Shoot the Moon. Others standouts were Eye of the Storm, Gimmie Shimmy, Just Light It, Unforgettable, and The Big Guns. UP Beyond Reality seemed weaker than usual which was disappointing, but the mines in WW Thug seemed better than I remembered and looked great.

The finale is always a key part of the show, and I felt like that part went great overall. I felt like the previous year looked pretty weak, so this year I used almost twice as much product in the last 30 seconds of the show, as well as focusing on big breaking cakes and fanned cakes to cover multiple heights and maximize saturation. The cakes were all supposed to end two or three seconds before the final shell volley of 20 UP Hard & Heavy. Some inevitably went long and ended a few seconds after the shells but it worked with the music and looked pretty nice. One unruly UP Good Fella ran another few shots after everything else ended, but was kind of funny looking so out of place, so I was actually pretty happy with it.

And I almost forgot, the show made the local news! Huge thanks to the Wolverine crew that did most of the actual work the day of the show, as well as two other Reedies who contacted me about helping and did a great job. 

Apologies for the poor video quality, I'm still using the 640x480 video mode on my old point and shoot camera. Additionally, it was raining during the show, so not only did water get on the lens, my hand trying to block the rain is visible at several points of the show. The music is hard to hear at points and I tried to add in the original audio track, but Windows Movie Maker isn't precise enough to match it up perfectly with the music in the video file. I might buy a proper video camera and tripod for next year... Anyway, it still look decent enough, so enjoy!

[OK, the video embedding is being difficult, so just go directly to the youtube page: Renn Fayre Fireworks 2014]