Walt
07-06-2022, 11:39 AM
All in all, very successful year. At least as far as the crowd is concerned anyways.
This was a big year for me. Was my largest budget yet, and first time E-Firing.
I had a little over 100 cakes, mostly 500g, including 3 zippers, 2 noabs, and a couple cases of 200g.
250 mortars, mostly Primo shell 60g cans, with a few legend crackling artillery in the mix.
I ran a 5 position front, with most of the show happening on 3 positions, and finale/fake finale including the 2 widest positions.
Bilusocn firing, I always struggle with wording here. To me a Cue is what I am pressing. So for me, this was a about a 40 cue show. But I was running close to 40 modules with about 160 initiators.
I had prepped all cakes, pre poked, labeled, taped the poke holes, and reboxed. This included building angled cake pieces and doing some fast fusing to make finale cake bundles. I fused mortar racks day before where they needed fusing, but had about 40 shells to poke day of.
Day of, I transported the product from the garage at the shoot site to a staging area just above the beach around noon. I poked all the shells, and inserted the still shorted E-match to them. All cakes remained boxed and poked but not matched.
6pm, I came back to the shoot site with 2 helpers, and some printouts of the layout. We had all cakes unboxed and set on the 5 firing lines fairly quickly, but then I had to match all the cakes. I had prepped nearly all the modules with initiators labeled where they go, and module labels. So I just had to unroll the initiator, poke my tape on the cakes, insert, and repeat. It took longer than I expected, and the finale modules had not been prepped so that took longer as well. I had to bump the shoot from 9pm to 9:20pm to give myself enough time to finish matching everything safely and ensure the product was all safely setup and angled. I am essentially the only qualified/knowledgeable person on site.
9:10pm I did a sweep and turned on all modules, but being late and operating with a headlamp, I did miss two modules.
I had a cue sheet with instructions and reminders to help me fire the show, but I found it to be difficult to use and then once I hit a module that I had missed it all fell apart. I kept a cool head and had most of the cue sheet in my mind pretty well so I just started working forward in the show methodically. I found it hard to keep track of last buttons pressed, and I had a section that required me to page up and down between area 2 and area 3 in the control desk to fire the same cues.
I had some mortar pieces intended to be a punctuation mark for the finale and fake finale, but they didn't work quite as well as intended. I had cakes run longer than intended in the finale plus I am pretty sure I miss-wired the finale modules because they were last in line and got wired about 8:45pm under pressure.
Lastly, it was so windy no one I knew felt comfortable flying my drone, so my video plan fell apart. My helpers decided to film the show from the side of the firing line so basically none of the fan effects are on film and it was filmed way to close. The guests at the party at the shoot site did snap some cell phone video but not a proper filming.
Big takeaways:
1) Next year I will be doing plywood cake boards, pre matched way ahead of time, with custom shunting plugs that I can remove from a shunting socket and plug directly into the modules once the boards are setup on site.
2) Get a friend trained up on my drone, or fly it myself day of
3) Buy/build something that allows me to hit a "fire next" button that automatically fires all needed initiators for a given cue, so all I have to do is press "next".
4) Don't mix and match direct firing in the lift cups with fused barages, timing is impossible that way.
5) E-firing is amazing, I had so much fun actually watching the effects above me and not just running around with a torch keeping things moving
6) The crowd has no idea that a show didn't go according to plan. My 4/10 execution was their 10/10 experience. Don't sweat it so much during planning and trying to be a perfectionist, they love it either way.
For the cue sheet falling apart and resorting to memory and dealing with missed modules, I am pretty proud of the outcome. I planned a 10 minute show 1 minute finale. I got about a 9 minute show and a 1 minute finale.
Full show:
https://youtu.be/9Wm5NjgpvVU
Video from the crowd perspective
Finale:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1brl_ukgK298CCWg29NZu71q4RPReXRSq
Noab Section and some mortar work:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bFNmHQ65RgaSr5kGkcWsFg0xDy_xO-MW
Some Zipper action:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bm_y88YgLvIMnp8fobs2eyXpkeApPR4g
Some more zipper action:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SHoxOjHNZ_kRcT4mbl58Dto5gbVwlrlW
63566357635863596360
Setup:
This was a big year for me. Was my largest budget yet, and first time E-Firing.
I had a little over 100 cakes, mostly 500g, including 3 zippers, 2 noabs, and a couple cases of 200g.
250 mortars, mostly Primo shell 60g cans, with a few legend crackling artillery in the mix.
I ran a 5 position front, with most of the show happening on 3 positions, and finale/fake finale including the 2 widest positions.
Bilusocn firing, I always struggle with wording here. To me a Cue is what I am pressing. So for me, this was a about a 40 cue show. But I was running close to 40 modules with about 160 initiators.
I had prepped all cakes, pre poked, labeled, taped the poke holes, and reboxed. This included building angled cake pieces and doing some fast fusing to make finale cake bundles. I fused mortar racks day before where they needed fusing, but had about 40 shells to poke day of.
Day of, I transported the product from the garage at the shoot site to a staging area just above the beach around noon. I poked all the shells, and inserted the still shorted E-match to them. All cakes remained boxed and poked but not matched.
6pm, I came back to the shoot site with 2 helpers, and some printouts of the layout. We had all cakes unboxed and set on the 5 firing lines fairly quickly, but then I had to match all the cakes. I had prepped nearly all the modules with initiators labeled where they go, and module labels. So I just had to unroll the initiator, poke my tape on the cakes, insert, and repeat. It took longer than I expected, and the finale modules had not been prepped so that took longer as well. I had to bump the shoot from 9pm to 9:20pm to give myself enough time to finish matching everything safely and ensure the product was all safely setup and angled. I am essentially the only qualified/knowledgeable person on site.
9:10pm I did a sweep and turned on all modules, but being late and operating with a headlamp, I did miss two modules.
I had a cue sheet with instructions and reminders to help me fire the show, but I found it to be difficult to use and then once I hit a module that I had missed it all fell apart. I kept a cool head and had most of the cue sheet in my mind pretty well so I just started working forward in the show methodically. I found it hard to keep track of last buttons pressed, and I had a section that required me to page up and down between area 2 and area 3 in the control desk to fire the same cues.
I had some mortar pieces intended to be a punctuation mark for the finale and fake finale, but they didn't work quite as well as intended. I had cakes run longer than intended in the finale plus I am pretty sure I miss-wired the finale modules because they were last in line and got wired about 8:45pm under pressure.
Lastly, it was so windy no one I knew felt comfortable flying my drone, so my video plan fell apart. My helpers decided to film the show from the side of the firing line so basically none of the fan effects are on film and it was filmed way to close. The guests at the party at the shoot site did snap some cell phone video but not a proper filming.
Big takeaways:
1) Next year I will be doing plywood cake boards, pre matched way ahead of time, with custom shunting plugs that I can remove from a shunting socket and plug directly into the modules once the boards are setup on site.
2) Get a friend trained up on my drone, or fly it myself day of
3) Buy/build something that allows me to hit a "fire next" button that automatically fires all needed initiators for a given cue, so all I have to do is press "next".
4) Don't mix and match direct firing in the lift cups with fused barages, timing is impossible that way.
5) E-firing is amazing, I had so much fun actually watching the effects above me and not just running around with a torch keeping things moving
6) The crowd has no idea that a show didn't go according to plan. My 4/10 execution was their 10/10 experience. Don't sweat it so much during planning and trying to be a perfectionist, they love it either way.
For the cue sheet falling apart and resorting to memory and dealing with missed modules, I am pretty proud of the outcome. I planned a 10 minute show 1 minute finale. I got about a 9 minute show and a 1 minute finale.
Full show:
https://youtu.be/9Wm5NjgpvVU
Video from the crowd perspective
Finale:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1brl_ukgK298CCWg29NZu71q4RPReXRSq
Noab Section and some mortar work:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bFNmHQ65RgaSr5kGkcWsFg0xDy_xO-MW
Some Zipper action:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bm_y88YgLvIMnp8fobs2eyXpkeApPR4g
Some more zipper action:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SHoxOjHNZ_kRcT4mbl58Dto5gbVwlrlW
63566357635863596360
Setup: