A spotlight on Special Effects

Buoyed by the success of William and Kate’s wedding, and a revitalised connection with the public, Buckingham Palace has announced details of another bumper bank holiday weekend, next June, in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The official celebrations will encompass a second ‘Party at the Palace’, 10 years after Brian May’s turn on the roof, and a giant flotilla on the Thames; up to 1,000 vessels decked out in their finery, ‘further enhanced with music, and pyrotechnic barges’. The images from London’s Olympic summer will be unforgettable, the Evening Standard already talking excitedly of a laser beam from the Queen Victoria Memorial to a ‘giant diamond-shaped beacon next to Admiralty Arch’.

Advances in laser technology mean stable, compact systems with more colour options, more power, and more creative potential. ER Productions used a 21W OPS whitelight laser to send a beam 2.6 miles from the Gherkin to the BT Tower, in corporate purple, as part of the 500 Days countdown to the Games.

ER won the Live Stage Show category at the international ILDA Awards in September for its work with Tinchy Stryder at the 2009 MOBO Awards, and put a mammoth installation of 14 lasers into the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern for the Tron: Legacy premiere party in December. For the BRITs at The O2, it used eight locations and a 40 position mirror system to create two very different looks for Tinie Tempah and Rihanna, and having delivered for Fatboy Slim, Queens of the Stone Age and others at Glastonbury, headed out to Malta for Isle of MTV.

Advances in equipment and technology aside, laser supply and operation is a specialist business, with robust health and safety rules, particularly where there is proximity to performers and/or audience.

“We’ve been working on the Raymond Gubbay Classical Spectacular concerts for the best part of 20 years now, and lasers are an integral part of the performance,” Will Hitchins, technical director at Definitive Special Projects, points out. “Recently, an arena wasn’t happy with the laser element because of something another company had done there. We were able to reassure them, but there’s a danger that venue operators will find it easier to impose a blanket ban. As an industry we need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“A venue might get four different laser companies telling them four different things about the same effect,” Hitchins says. “But they can all be right. And the buck stops with us. Like pyro, if it’s done properly, and inspected, there isn’t a problem.”

On Fire

Quantum Special Effects was behind the hair-raising Martian Heat-Ray on the recent European outing for Jeff Wayne’s musical The War of The Worlds. A bespoke version of the company’s Spitfire liquid flame system, fired downwards, it was subject to rigorous calculation and testing at each venue to establish safe distances from cast and audience. ‘A whole new level of excitement’, as Wayne put it.

Quantum is currently providing effects during Firework for Katy Perry’s world tour, having put together the full-throttle pyro show with Cirque Bijou for her performance on The X Factor in October, and has a barrage out with Take That.

“A lot of consideration went into the ‘atom bomb’, and how to do it safely,” managing director Shaun Barnett states. “It’s fired from the B stage and it’s pretty close to the audience. We’re using a piece of kit we used on the Pink tour last year, which we’ve modified to shoot several kilos of lycopodium into the air which we ignite with pyrotechnics to create a mushroom cloud of flame. Lycopodium is a natural organic substance so there are no health or environmental issues.”

Elsewhere, there’s a confetti blast during Greatest Day, liquid flame and pyro for Robbie Williams’ entrance, smoke-filled bubbles rising and swirling during Shine, while for Hold Up A Light, dancers use handheld flares. “That was something Kim [Gavin] specifically asked for,” Barnett continues. “We engineered a lot of safety features specific to how they’re being used and it looks amazing.”

Pyrojunkies specialises in close proximity stage effects. It supplied a 20m downstage flame wall for the JLS Outta This World arena tour, and was back with the boys, and Production North, at the Capital FM Summertime Ball at Wembley Stadium on June 12.

“We had an opening sequence of streamers, massive CO2 plumes from our new [MagicFX] Dominators and a big pyro hit off the roof as JLS came out,” co-founder Richard Huffam says. “We also did pyro for Nicole Scherzinger and Ne-Yo, liquid flame for The Wanted and some big stuff for Jennifer Lopez who closed the show.”

Another Pyrojunkies crew was at Download the same day with propane gas and pyro for Bullet For My Valentine, and the company is still on the road with comedian Peter Kay, providing a flame/pyro/confetti/streamers finale for what will be 100+ dates. Other recent gigs; a 20ft flaming McFly logo for the band’s Above The Noise tour, and a late call for CO2 jets for a Kanye West gig in Morocco.

MTFX has amassed a wide range of special effects, from pyrotechnics and ‘dancing flames’, to intelligent waterscreens and the high voltage lightning effects it put together recently for the Kaiser Chiefs’ Little Shocks video shoot. The acquisition of Colourful Cascades earlier this year expanded the reach and capacity of its confetti division, which put a total of 18 Master Blaster cannons in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park for April’s royal wedding celebrations (pictured below).

Confetti Magic fired streamers, CO2 jets and pyro at the official opening of the new Ben 10 rollercoaster at Drayton Manor this spring, and supplied confetti for a website promo ahead of Ford’s ‘Focus Cam’ experiential activity at the UEFA Champions Festival in Hyde Park. “Confetti is a great way to add depth to a shot,” managing director Ian Woodroof explains. “Ford were using a system of 40 cameras to create a rotating freeze frame video capturing people Matrixstyle, and the confetti really helped the 3D effect.”

Show Business 

Pyrotechnic specialist The World Famous previewed elements of a new performance piece All Hands at Rochester Castle during the Fuse Medway Festival.

“We’ve learned a lot from touring our other shows Full Circle and Crackers,” director Mike Roberts says. “There’s a limited number of festivals with both budget and site for something of that scale, so with All Hands, we’ve designed a show we can tailor to work on a number of levels.”

The next outing will be at the SO Festival in Skegness on July 22, followed by the Canterbury Festival in October, both of which will inform the production that goes on tour in 2012. “We’re rightly picky about the quality of fireworks we use,” Roberts continues, “but in an effort to be sustainable we will be travelling light and sourcing as much material as we can locally.”

BrightFX, a blend of pyro and circus performers, will use a wireless system to fire the opening of the Canterbury Festival this year. “It means we can spread the effects over a much wider area,” technical director John Kennett explains. “It’s not just a case of not having to cable, it opens up a lot more possibilities when it comes to artistic design.

“We don’t do many straight firework displays,” he continues. “We’re more about live performance, in close proximity to an audience.” Burning The Clocks, for example, the annual winter solstice lantern parade in Brighton, sees BrightFX work with community arts organisation Same Sky to animate a climactic sculptural burn on the beach.

“It’s a tough time for festival arts budgets,” Kennett says, “but it’s possible to make a big impact with smaller effects. For several years we’ve worked with The Oracle in Reading to launch their Christmas shopping season. It’s a tricky site on the river, but this year we put in seven lasers, and fired from the bridge and three rooftops, with a pyro waterfall and propane fireballs, all choreographed to music. Client and crowd loved it.”