New Year's Eve Set Up Day 4

Time is ticking fast and the moment of truth is fast approaching, today is spent rigging the roman candles on the 13 front positions on each barge. From each position we fire a wide variety of roman candles up to 47mm, single shot effects up to 60mm and mines up to 100mm. All the igniters are run into our waterproof compact rails which are built on to a mounting plate fixed in to a Peli flight case. Once the lid is closed the flight case can sit in a torrential downpour ensuring the module and the 32 dual push button connectors remain dry.

The roman candle combinations are also bagged up to make sure they are waterproof, an igniter fitted and then labelled to ensure the cake is wired in to the correct cue. It takes four people the entire morning just to bag and fuse all the cakes, they are then loaded on to their respective barges and positioned in the correct orientation and wired in. With this quantity of cakes our licensed store is essential, and in the event that it is raining we have a marquee situated in the dock area so that we can work on the fireworks under cover.


The final aspect to the show set up is the six pontoons which are equidistantly positioned between the barges which when added to the barge positions creates 12 firing platforms approximately 20 meters apart giving us an entire frontage of 200 meters width along the Thames in front of the Eye. From the pontoons we fire a large quantity of one shot effects, single shot fan barrages and small cakes. All the effects are carefully positioned and wired in to compact rails.

By mid afternoon the barges are ready to be towed up river, one by one all three barges make the two hour trip to the permanent mooring just down river of the London Eye, where they will remain overnight until they are moved in to final show position mid morning of the 31st. The middle barge will not be moved until 4pm on the day, the middle barge is moored on the London Eye Pier which receives a large number of pleasure boats throughout the day, so we have to wait for the last tourist boat to leave before the pier is handed over to us.


Tonight on the Eye we have a full technical rehearsal, at midnight we will run through the entire show, both sound and lights but obviously without any pyro. 32 moving head lights are loaded in to the Eye, one for each capsule, a team of 8 lighting technicians remove the light from its flight case, race in to the capsule, strap the light on to a support in the capsule, plug it in, connect the wireless receivers and then check to make sure the light is operating correctly before moving on the next capsule, the Eye constantly rotates as the lighting crew rig each light in about 35 minutes. Below are just a few flight cases waiting to be loaded.


Once the last light is loaded, the Eye is moved to its lock down position and handed over to us. At this point we drop down the data run tails from the first cradle then connect our loom which runs from the base of the Eye to our command and control located on Queens Walk behind the Eye. This is the first time we get the chance to run a full comms test with the modules only on the Eye and Hub, a very nerve racking moment, it is here that we find out whether we have any major comms issues or not.

Working on the London Eye is fraught with problems from many different aspects. The greatest problem form a technical point of view is RF and Electromagnetic interference. We are in one of the harshest environments in the country to experience both and in significant doses. The electromagnetic interference comes from the 63 amp 3 phase power cables which run around the perimeter of the Eye feeding power to each of the capsules to run the lighting, heating and air conditioning as well as the motors that operate each capsule as the Eye rotates. The RF interference comes from the very busy radio traffic which is prevalent in this part of London, both from normal transmitters in the locality as well as huge RF security nets which protect the government buildings on the opposite side of the river.

If we were in any doubt of experiencing any interference, we were ensuring the best possible scenario to create interference by building a huge antenna by running two cable runs entirely round the London Eye which is the largest steel circular structure in the capital. One would not be in the least bit surprised to connect up all the data networks and find the Archers theme tune being received through our aerial. The comms test is a success with a 100% pass, while the rehearsal takes place we run the laptop to constantly test sequentially each module in turn, in the three hours the Eye is locked down we send over 4,000 packets of information and not one drop out from any module.