I attended the press conference for the 2008 season yesterday and have various pieces of interesting news.

Firstly, the seating has been rearranged with the demolition of the control room (centered in the silver section) and the installation of new grandstands behind where this was located, actually above the wide central path that used to go from the entrance of La Ronde alongside the Lac des Dauphins. This path is no longer there! The new grandstands give many more seats in the central section with the higher rows having the best view of the lake. There's a new control room at the back of this new grandstand. The old bronze section grandstands have been removed and the Bistro SAQ relocated there. It looks like this may remain open during the fireworks as it's now out of the fallout zone (I didn't hear any confirmation of this one way or the other).

There was also an announcement made that there would be better facilities for VIPs and a higher level of service for these - this is actually quite important as corporate customers form a rather large portion of the paying audience. There are going to be "VIP Skyboxes" at the highest level giving the best possible view.

There will be a special "Water Taxi" service introduced to take people from the Old Port directly to (and from) La Ronde, presumably docking in the marina that's behind the parking lot at the end of Isle Ste Helene.

A change has been made to the judging criteria, partly in response to the changes in technology used in fireworks over the past few years (i.e. better synchronization). The new criteria take into account the use all aspects of the space available, both in the sky and on the lake. There are now five judging criteria:

- Pyrotechnic components (diversity, quality, colour)
- Synchronization
- Soundtrack
- Technical design
- Pyromusical concept

There's also going to be enhancements at the pre- and post-fireworks shows at the Jardi des Etoiles with a "Boite de nuit du Jardin des Etoiles".

It was also announced the the Quebec ministry of tourism is providing a grant of $440,000 for the competition this year.

Martyne Gagnon also paid hommage to the late Georges Lamon who will be sadly missed this year.

As usual, I will be providing reports and will be updating the schedule page with each team's theme as announced yesterday. As you may have noticed, I've created a forum for posts related to the 2008 season, this being the first one

Paul.

oh I'd like to say that the themes chosen by each of the participants this year are very interesting. From the themes alone i could say that the jury this year would have quite a hard time choosing the winner. I guess i should just wait for the videos of this year's competition to see hehe. May i ask what was the judging criteria before??

I begin the coverage of the 2008 edition on PyroPlanet with a first report featuring an interview with Martyne Gagnon, director of the competition. You will find more details about the new criteria and the impact of go-kart track on the firing area.

http://www.pyroplanet.com/article481.html

I think that the new evaluation grid is great, clearer and more precise. I agree to allow some marks specifically to the quality of soundtrack and the actual use of the firing area, as well as to remove the "general appreciation" criterion, which was too vague.

Fred

P.S.: Please note that your reporter will not provide full video of the displays on PyroPlanet. However, some surprises may occur during the season...

Thanks for the interesting article Fred.

As for videos, your humble reporter is going to experiment with a real video camera this year so look out for much better quality videos this time!

The weather forecast looks good for Saturday so now the final countdown has begun.

Regards,

Paul.

An excellent and informative report, Fred. It's interesting to note the new decreased figure of available seats as a result of the site transformations - about 132 seats less. In addition, there is a net decrease in space for those who are regularly non-ticket viewers. Overall, this may warrant a decrease in the amount of spectators at La Ronde this season. Have ticket prices gone up, in general, because of the changes to the site and subsequent space availability?

Regarding the judging regulations, they are relatively straight-forward and are still fairly identical to what they were, just with the absence of the general appreciation piece. However, it appears that there's particularly much more emphasis on synchronization and choice of music, and hence the fact that they're separated as two individual judging criteria. Choice of music itself seems to have been removed from a part of the "pyromusical concept" and added as a separate judging factor.

The general descriptions of what is expected of this year's competitors are most intriguing. I'm most particularly enamored with France's presentation since it offers and revolves around a galactic point of view. A massive supernova was recently detected by the hubble space telescope; an event for which scientists were waiting patiently for about 30 years, so this kind of opening to the competition seems rather appropriate. Furthermore, the Phoenix Space Lander craft that has landed on one of Mars's polar regions several weeks ago has also made big space news. Montreal in the Stars seems pretty nifty!

The selected themes, in general, though seem to be very direct, and I have a feeling that there may be some difficulty in detecting the connection between the theme and the design components of some displays, such as with Portugal's or South Korea's. For the most part, all the displays look to be interesting, but I'm most notably looking forward to France, Australia, United States, Canada, Italy and Austria.

Austria's "Heaven and Hell" should have some dramatic transitions and Canada's theme around the Aurora Borealis and Australis should also be a delicate and color-rich kind of display - I've always been fascinated when studying the Northern and Southern lights and their associated intrinsic colors. The American performance sort of has an identical premise in terms of music with last year's show, though just with more diversity in soundtrack instead of just Elvis Presley songs - could be a wild show, though. South Korea looks like it has some of my favorite genres of music, and I like their attempt at perfectly synchronizing sound and light. Australia, too, has some sweet music choices, not to mention its hyped-style kind of show! I was probably most surprised that China isn't doing so much in the way of using their lucky year (888) as part of their performance this year, especially considering that their date of presentation is very close to August 8th. Regardless, the performance looks to be a highly artistic one!

Look very much forward to the various video clips. Just one thing that was never clear to me, though, but is there any sort of penalty given to a given participant if they go over the allocated time by, say, 2-3 minutes?

As for the weather, it's still a tricky forecast for this Saturday, not so much the day itself, but later in it. I'll be able to provide more details later today or tomorrow morning as I get newer models to work with. I suppose we've got good reason to be positive, though.

Trav.

Yeah! the theme montreal in the stars is quite coincidental with the news about mars etc.. I think france will present a very creative show hehe.....

Maybe portugal's theme is connected with the movie awards such as oscar's, cannes film festival, etc.. Heard they'll be using songs from ghostbusters, starwars, mission impossible, jaws, and E.T.

I guess you better expect a lot from austria since they just won the Nuits De Feu competition in france beating 2005 winner, Argentina and Vicente Caballer. Plus i've seen a smaller version of their show heaven and hell when they presented it somewhere else ahaha!

I wonder how sunny would top all their previous shows...

vander

I know for a fact that Sunny's show won't designed by Eric Tucker this year. He is under contractual obligations from Disney... But he is planning to attend a few shows.