Hello Guys, I have been reading this forum for a long time but have never posted before. I have noticed something this year and I was wondering if those more "in the know" than me could tell me if there has been a change in the rules on the time allowed to prepare the shows? If I remember correctly, the rule in years past was that the teams had 3 days outside the site to prepare everything, and then 3 days on the site for the installation. It seems that for most teams, the real limit as to how big a show can get is not so much the money, but more what can be done within those 6 days. I remember seeing a few shows that had problems because the teams could not finish installing them on time. A famous example that comes to mind was team USA many years ago. I think that this rule tends to favor the teams that are very well prepared and have invested in systems that allow them to prepare big shows very efficiently. A few team names that come to mind are Pyroemotions, Melrose and Ricasa. I think that this rule is what makes a show in Montreal so challenging, basically teams need to be at the top of their games to compete here. This year, there has been pictures on social media of Dragon Fireworks working at La Ronde since the first week of July. So my question is, have the rules been changed this year? Do all the teams now get two weeks of preparation at La Ronde before going on the firing site? I have looked at social media postings from the other teams competing so far and it seems they are all doing only 3 days of preparation, as was the case before. So is this a new rule that only Dragon Fireworks took advantage of? Anyone knows?

I think you have some figures wrong here. There's a total of five days of setup - two days of pre-montage and then three days on the ramps. Of course, pre-montage can continue for as long as you want, but eventually everything has to be out on the ramps. You're right in that the complexity of any display is limited by what can be setup in time.

Local Canadian teams (and to some extent those in the US) have something of an advantage as they can do some pre-montage in their shops before driving to La Ronde. For companies who have to ship by ocean-going container, there are limits on what can be done and will fit in the container. So it's not clear cut as to how the rules actually apply. I can ask the organizers about what is happening in the Dragon case. When I did the interview yesterday, nothing from the offsite pre-mounting area had been moved over to the firing site, except for the pontoon positions.

Paul.

Was there ever an answer to this?
Did the Competition rules / rider change and officially allow teams more than the normal 5 days total for show prep/setup? Will we see this continue as we go forward towards next year and can we expect more displays like Dragon's where the setup extends much farther past the 5 days and allows a big bunch of extra cues and elaborate setups?

People seem to be making an issue out of this and here's what really happened. We weren't given extra days because we couldn't finish our show in time. No one could ever build a proper Montreal show with the given set-up schedule from scratch; any sort of pre-preparing is a must if a company ever wants to do a proper show in Montreal. Opening and closing shows included.

Our team experienced a big shipment problem where in our already prepared materials couldnt make it out of our country. Our factory spent a lot of weeks manufacturing and preparing the single shots, shells, and cakes for our show only to find out that the shipping company would not allow them to be shipped out. Our factory workers were forced to take them out of the racks so that we could ship out the equipment used for our show such as the single shot racks and gerb racks that we used.

With only 2 months before our show, we had to redesign all 9500 cues of the show according to the products available in Europe and U.S.A. We were very lucky to have Panzera help us produce special items with only less than a month to manufacture thousands of single shots for the show and ACE Pyro for letting us use most of their stock of high quality shells for the show. That said, it means they'd come straight from the factory/warehouse without any show label that would indicate angles or modules. Some other italian products did not make it as well in the final delivery which forced us to buy more products from Canada and we had to hope that they' ll be delivered in time for our show with some of the products arriving only 4 days before our show.

If you haven't noticed, at this time we already redesigned and bought/manufactured products for almost 3 shows of the same size presented. Although expensive, we still tried to present the best show we can for Montreal as we all respected the prestige of the competition and wouldn't like to make a show just because we signed a contract.

As I have told many forum members after our show when they asked how I felt about our show, I told them that I already feel lucky just having a show to present in Montreal. After all this problems, it seemed impossible to make this show come to life and after seeing the outcome of our hard work and perseverance, our team was very happy with the result and couldn't have asked for more.

Finally, we are very thankful for the organization for understanding the logistics mess that we encountered and for giving us some space to work on our show just outside La Ronde before our actual given set up days. We have been doing the same for our other European competitions where in we rent a place near the venue where we can set up the show before the given set up days. Some companies would not even bother pre-setting up their show which results into a messy show.

Should Canadian companies be at fault if they are setting up the show in their facilities in Montreal/Quebec, outside La Ronde before their given set up schedule? As a foreign team, we do not have this luxury if we face big logistic issues like we had and backing out of the competition would have given the organization a bigger problem and was never really a choice for us.

Best Regards,
Vander