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Plan Your Show On Paper
When you go to a really good professional display chances are that they did not just throw a bunch of items together and light them in any order. Professional show takes weeks or months of planning and design. This one of the ways that I collect and organize my ideas for my show every year.
Knowing What You Are Looking For:
The first step in designing a show on paper is to know what type of
items are available to you. If you are unfamiliar with a lot of items, this
will limit how much of your show you can design on paper. To familiarize
yourself with more items you could test fire a couple pieces before your
display. However this can get expensive really fast, the other option is two
look for companies websites that give you descriptions, height, etc. Most
larger companies with have really detailed websites.
Designing The Firing Area:
When I design the area from which I am going to be firing my display
from, I go through many different revisions. When I design the overall
layout of the area I try to know ahead of time a few things; number of
shooters, where the audience will be sitting, type of items available. When
deciding how to set everything up I try to remember a few general rules
mortar racks always face perpendicular from the audience and larger items
tend to be in the back farthest from the audience. The reason why it is
important to know how many people will be lighting your show is so that you
don't space items out to far making your team run all over trying to light
stuff. Also don't leave little room between racks you want at least 4 ft
between racks in parallel lines. This gives enough room to safely move
around. Try to give different sections to different people so that they
don't have to leave a certain area. This is also wise so that the shooter
never has to cross a section that is currently going off.
Designing Mortar Rack Flights:
The planning documents that I use to design my mortar rack flights
are available to you to download. The documents are in a .txt format
here. Below is an example of what
one would look like when designing flight(s) for one of my 6-shot
racks. If you need more spots for larger racks just create additional rows.
| O O 1._________
2._________ O O 3._________ 4._________ O O 5._________ 6._________ |
The concept for designing flights is really easy and effective. Most higher end kit's shells have labels on them that tell you what each shell does. When designing flights I take all of the shells that I have and lay them out before me. The next step it to group any shells that you might have duplicates of. |
You want to then either write or type up a sheet with all of the different effects that you have available to use. This sheet is used to give you an idea of what you have without have to look through all of your shells, and save on handling them. This list can also be used to keep track of which shells you have all ready used and which ones you still have left. Now that you have an idea of what types of effects you have now time to start planning your flights. With designing flights I try to combine colors and number of breaks to give a overall nice aerial effect.
Now that you have your shells picked out for your flights now it is time to decide how you are going to fuse them together. Just because the slots where the shells are is to write what shell goes where. This doesn't mean you have to set them off in that order. The best way to plan where you are going to lay the fuse is to draw on the rack diagram where each fuse or fuses would be and write what shell each would be attached to.
More coming..