Please post your reviews of the American display here.

Trav.

Professional activities scheduled tomorrow (Sunday) prevent me to post an extended review tonight.

The American team did a good display. A promising theme and well-known musics made the audience vocal at several moments. The penultimate segment and the finale were great. However, some sequences were repetitive, and the design was not as complex as what other participants had done. Given the level of the competition so far, it is likely that Melrose will miss the podium this year. But these things need to be put in perspective : we were still lucky to attend a such extravaganza tonight!

More details soon.

Fred

A very enjoyable display by Melrose Pyrotechnics! It was very active and filled with plenty of salutes and chest-/clothes-thumping shells. The low-level sequences were also very admirable, and the soundtrack was engaging to go along with the interesting theme. All that said, there had been some repetition of effects, and the diversity/creativity of the show was somewhat less than I expected. Nevertheless, a very nice early-birthday present.

My footage can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzZiHx8wFoM

Welcome to the heart of Summer, folks.

Trav.

Here is the link for the 2014 videos.

http://www.burchcom.com/2014/index.html

To download your own copy, right click on this link and select "save target as" ... the file is 950 MB

http://www.burchcom.com/2014/2014usa.mp4

Salut

Melrose nous a présenté un excellent spectacle hier soir par un temps idéal. Beaucoup de spectateurs sur le pont et probablement tout autant ailleurs.
Bon j'étais supposé avoir peur mais ce ne fut pas le cas.(lol)

J'ai beaucoup apprécié la qualité et une belle variétés des pièces pyro.
J'ai adoré les couleurs vives, très lumineuses, amples particulièrement les bleus et rarement vu , le rose à la fin de la prestation.

A l'instar de Smoke j'ai noté aussi des éléments répétitifs Pas trop d'effets surprenants , pas de surprises , peu émotionnel.Je suis aussi d,accord avec lui sur le fait qu'il leur faudra oublier un podium cette année.

Mon classement

Canada
Espagne
USA
Italie.

Bonne journée à tous.

Roger

Here are more comments on the Melrose's show, which was the 270th display in the history of the Montreal International Fireworks Competition. That team being winner of Gold Jupiter in 2006 and Bronze Jupiter in 2009, that was an anticipated display, especially as the Fright Night is an original way to explore a broad repertoire of musics, and to add in some special and thrilling effects. It is also funny that, thanks to a photo published on her Facebook account during the Halloween season, competition director Martyne Gagnon was the muse of the designers!

As we entered into the grandstands, we were offered a green hand-shaped cardboard featuring the Fright Night theme, the "fingers" holding, on the reverse side, a drawn information card introducing the show. However, in opposition to the Reel Love cardboard designed in 2009, it didn't present the soundtrack listing.



The show opened dramatically on the well-known music of Michael Jackson's Thriller, with a line of red flares, white flashes synchronized on thunder, and red horsetails, followed by shells of white comets and red stars. The audience became immediately vocal when that song began. Then, the red horsetails were back. Candles of meteor-headed comets erupted, augmented with shells of farfalles. Then, shells of white comets and red stars were back, and so on for the remaining of that segment. Similar repetitive patterns occurred during several parts of the show. Later, on the music of "People are strange", we saw volleys and volleys of smiley-face shells. During another segment, shells of double-farfalle and shells making clusters of crackling stars were exhibited in the same way.

More interesting patterns appeared during the show, like some very fast sequences of comets and tourbillons shot from the perimeter of the 4th ramp. On the music of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", the 5th ramp (made of seven floating platforms) came into life with green and purple flares, followed by various patterns of gerbs of the same colours, then augmented by fast and powerful sequences of green and purple mines on ramps 3 and 5. Later, meteor-headed comets moved along cables installed on the third ramp. The penultimate segment featured massive fans shooting interesting patterns of mines and/or comets. There was also a sort of rainbow effect on the music of "Wizard of Oz", but only with a partial set of colours.

Nonetheless, the technical and pyromusical design of other participants of this 30th edition were superior to this one. As I described, the design was often "simple" (while a such statement is unfair given the amount of time and energy required to set up a such display) and repetitive. As soon as the opening segment, I detected this problem and many subsequent segments confirmed this early assessment. The range of products was more limited than in other displays, and pyrotechnic effects were often limited to one level at a time. The Thriller segment of the Swedish display in 2010, while shorter, was much more complex and dramatic. In the same way, Grupo Luso Pirotécnia (Portugal) used more evocative pyrotechnic devices for the Ghostbusters part of their show in 2008.

The soundtrack was well-done, while I don't really understand why Thriller was heard twice. I would have expected a particular twist for that. The narrative wasn't too obtrusive, but it didn't bring anything to the show. All designers should note that the competition master of ceremony inform the audience about the theme before the display, so any narrative of this sort is a duplication.

Unfortunately for Melrose, with three on-competition shows displayed before this one, I can already say that Fright Night will not be in my personal Top 3. It could have been different in previous years, but with the level of the competition so far, I would be very surprised to see Melrose on the podium this year.

Fred

Ce fut un beau spectacle mais sans éclat, sans grande créativité. Une finale intéressante grâce à l'utilisation de nombreux salutes Dommage que les USA se retrouvait tout de suite après la formidable prestation du Canada.....ce qui a fait pâlir leur performance encore plus.

Mon classement à ce jour:

1-Canada
2-Espagne
3-USA
4-Italie

Je tiens à remercier sincèrement Burchcom pour ses vidéos dont la qualité est surprenante. J'apprécie pouvoir immortaliser ces feux d'artifice. Merci encore Burchcom!

Pierre

Very good show by the American team. I kind of agree with everyone else about the somewhat simplicity of the show. Personally, with a theme like this one, I would have made it a bit more "cartoonish" like the final Panzera show of 2000 and would have selected only "cartoon" and family type of Halloween songs. I think the whole show could have been better and original. It was still pretty good and entertaining.

The finale was awesome and felt longer than usual! Solid displays so far for the 30th anniversary.

My rankings so far:

1. Canada
2. Spain
3. USA
4. Italy

My report: http://montreal-fireworks.com/ReportBlog/?p=925

A good display by Melrose, but I don't think they are a contender for the Gold Jupiter. Still a podium contender, but we still have two excellent companies left to compete. What an excellent year!

Paul.

That was a bit of a disappointing show specially after seeing their cue count! I was hoping for something grander specially with their finale. The finale they made for their last show was very good but this year's finale seemed like a poor mans copy of scarpato's finale. However the last 2 songs of the show was definitely my favorite parts. I didn't like the parts where they would just fire shells without any ground support in the display. The only thing that melrose did better than the other shows so far was that they had very clean angles and the show looked very clean without overdoing any parts. Effects were also well showcased. Unfortunately I don't think they did better than Caballer or Canada.

The competition this year definitely feels short.

Vander

A return to more Summer-like weather (marking the beginning of a near-technical heat wave) took place in time for the American display, with evening/late-evening temperatures remaining at 25 C in the Montreal metropolitan area, moderate humidity and somewhat breezy SE to SSE winds (16-19 km/h), blowing the smoke generally to the right of the audience at La Ronde, and sometimes quickly towards far left viewing sections of Notre-Dame street. Conditions likely largely invited the largest audience so far this year (at least on Notre-Dame street!)

This was a very enjoyable display produced by Melrose Pyrotechnics of the United States, which began (dramatically) rather early (between late-9:58 p.m. to early-9:59 p.m.) and subsequently startled many members of the audience! The theme was novel and was generally fairly well organized from one segment to the next. As already mentioned above, the soundtrack editing was excellent and made for some particularly good transitions. Michael Jackson’s Thriller was particularly appreciated, almost immediately leading to strong cheers of approval during both the opening and closing segments. Product quality was also high, with many symmetrical shells and effects displaying a fabulous selection of rich and vibrant colors. Some sections also featured an interesting interplay of effects, but much of the display was filled with powerful mid- to upper-level thumping shells and salutes, many of which occurred at very high-level. I also greatly appreciated the moments of photoflashes and farfalle shells, as well as the drooping effects to remind us of the interesting and engaging theme of “Fright Night”. The single-ascension gold-glittering girandolas were also breathtaking. The low-level sequences were also very much enjoyable, and the rather large width that they sometimes created was quite admirable. Ramp 5, again, exhibited some very enticing sequences and circular firing angles. Because of the vigorous nature of the display, many spectators (including myself) very thoroughly enjoyed it, especially considering that we frequently had to look well above to capture those shells! Indeed, the large audience was very often dazzled.

As much as I enjoyed the American performance, however, I do not believe that its pyromusical and technical designs were as successful as they could have been. Firstly, at many points of the display, I felt that most segments lacked pronounced creativity and/or complexity that some displays previously featured this season (notably the Spanish and Canadian shows). More specifically, I was very frequently not sensing those feelings of dread or terror when viewing the display, leading to the impression of a somewhat weaker thematic connection - the theme, itself, seemed more detectable through the soundtrack selection, much like what was felt during the Italian performance this year and was most evident when hearing Vincent Price’s infamous laughter (and that similar laughter heard during the introduction) at the end of the highly popular “Thriller”. Many of the soundtracks used (most of which were very appropriate), too, did not appear to have particularly strong representations through the pyrotechnics. For instance, there were some brief pauses of dark skies while the music was present, and I thought that certain effects could have been used more accurately to highlight key components of the music. In that regard, as Fred mentioned above, I, too, was expecting more from the “Ghostbusters” theme song, in particular, especially after vividly remembering what Portugal 2008 did with it, as well as, more recently, Sweden 2010's version of "Thriller". Instead, many firing patterns and effects were repeated, and this meant that the overall diversity of the show was somewhat restricted. The musical choices were, again, very relevant, but I was bewildered as to why “Thriller” was duplicated, and the “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” piece seemed divergent from the general flow. Finally, because so much activity was occurring at high-level, I thought that this sometimes compromised the vertical depth of the display and, ultimately, musical representation. The finale was excellent, fearsome and had the correct longevity, but it just needed more in the way of color and crescendo.

In general, I would like to, once again, state that this was very enjoyable display by Melrose Pyrotechnics and was certainly an exciting one for those who enjoy the loud, powerful aspects (myself included, especially as an early birthday treat). The lack of creativity, though, will likely prevent 1st place status, but I still would not rule out a potential Jupiter altogether (after seeing 2008’s results, I am not prepared to fully discount anything)!

Trav.