The Cleveland Bicentennial
Celebration 200! was a grand undertaking for Stage Research,
Inc. The weekend long event in July of 1996 was a culmination of a
year long bicentennial celebration in the city of Cleveland. The
Celebration 200! event took place in the revitalized downtown
riverfront district in downtown Cleveland, and included music,
lasers, fireworks, a parade of boats, and many other festival
activities.
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As contractors, Stage Research provided the
show control computers and programming that controlled the weekend events
including Audio Playback, Video Playback, Time Code for lights, and FSK
time code for pyrotechnics. Listed below is a short summary of SFX's
involvement.
The Systems
 A total of five
computers were used for the entire show allowing for three for main
control and two for backup. Each computer was a Pentium 133Mhz, with 64Meg
RAM, 2GIG SCSI Internal Hard Drive, 1GIG Removable Hard Drive and a Turtle
Beach Sound card. One computer had an additional high quality NTSC video
card.
The
Shows
Friday Night - Events kicked
off with the Sea
World Skiers performing Bay Watch on the Cuyahoga river. Multi-track
audio was provided for the show using SFX Array for simple point and click
operation. The show continued with the parade of boats down the river and
ended the night with a pyrotechnics display, followed with credits on a
large screen display. SFX sent time code and FSK to various parts on the
river in order to synchronize the devices.
Saturday Night -
Following the Baywatch show was the music group D'Cuckoo. D'Cuckoo's high-tech musical
performance included computer generated graphics, and for their finale,
the music was timed to pyrotechnics, lights, and lasers using time code
outputted from SFX.
Sunday Night - A fairly light
show for SFX, a little rain, and the Cleveland Orchestra. Again the
finale was controlled and timed using time code from SFX to various points
on the river to control lasers and pyrotechnics.
SFX performed
flawlessly and the two additional backup systems were never used - well
Solitaire tended to pop up on them on occasion. ;-)
Designed by the Entertainment and Technical
Departments of Sea World of Ohio, Carlton Guc, and Brad Rembielak. |