PYrO
The pyro system on Sanctuary is a custom creation, designed from the ground up by a team of pyrotechnic engineers headed by Justin Gray.
Gray got his start with a metalwork apprenticeship when he was 18, working full-time for a former Bauhaus professor and master of patina. In the late 1990s, Gray started teaching at the newly-founded Oakland industrial arts school, The Crucible. He was then part of the team that created Thermo Kraken, a turbine engine-powered fire sculpture from 2002, and built a number of major projects in the years afterwards. He says he joined Sanctuary’s team to do “next level” stuff.
The Next Level of Pyro Systems
Sanctuary was Gray’s opportunity to develop “a system that included eight color fire shooters with a DMX interface” — in other words, a console that ties all the visual effects cohesively together under a unified control system for every performance. Stunning explosions of light can be deployed at key moments of a performance, and colors can be adjusted on the fly.
For example, a DJ could program stage lights to be triggered by certain notes in the music, and then the fire can get triggered by those. Sanctuary features eight flame emitters total, each with adjustable intensity and colored fire systems that allow for green, blue, orange, yellow, and red flame effects.
It took six months to design, and nine months of full-time work for Gray and his team to build.
“Everything was custom built,” Gray says. “There’s no off-the-shelf here.” He adds that while building Sanctuary’s pyro system, his slogan was “What would NASA do?” — in other words, how could he hold the production to the highest level of safety and quality?
“The hardware that burns fire on Sanctuary is going to outlast all of us because it’s all stainless steel. It’ll never rust or rot. A hundred years from now you could kick the dust off and get it running again, and it would still work.”
Technical Details
8 colored fire propane shooters.
160 gallon liquid propane tanks feeding 2 Z40 electric vaporizers running 40 GPH each, which feeds into dual primary ballast tanks feeding 8 colored flame shooters.
The systems design pressure is 165 PSI; safe maximum is 200 PSI.
System is rated 350 PSI liquid propane.
Primary interface is a custom microprocessor allowing manual, automatic and DMX operations.
Control over the pyro was done using a custom DMX relay board triggered by the MPC console.
Color is a trade secret — a proprietary color injection system that Gray developed in 2001.
