Fire on Stage

[Jivemaster]

Draw up several plans risk assesments etc then talk to each venue in detail. I've heard of fire officers disliking the larger silk "flames" on grounds of incipient fear of fire. If you cant have real fire and cant have silk "flame effect" then where do you go then?

[Tomo]

I saw those propane DMX controlled flamers at the White Light do.  (Shortly before I became rather impressively inebriated.)  They're utterly terrifying.

What the *****!?

 

I thought that the USITT-DMX512 protocol was not permitted to be used for control of anything where failure to receive the correct signal could result in personal injury.

A flamethrower falls into that category in my book!

[Brian]

According to the DMX spec, no-one should make such a device which they claim to be DMX capable.

[vinny baby]

yes thats a good point, I also thought that, hmm, seems a bit dodgy to me.

 

also, I do quite a lot of work with a heavy metal band, and we enquired about using real fire effects, but 80% of venues, said they wouldnt allow it, so we just scraped the idea, and left our self, with a bit more cash to play with, so we used CO2 effects instead.

 

I think real fire effects should be carried out by an experienced operater, therefore hiring 1 in, that could set up, operate, then remove the effects.

 

I can still remember when TT (take that) first started touring, and they had two massive bowls on stage, that contained flamable fabric, the idea was that a pyro rocket, (steel wire rocket) flew over the audience, and lit the bowls, (the bowls were electricly ignited) anyway the SL bowl didnt light, so one of the technicians ran across the stage and lit it with a zippo lighter, to cut a long story short, the rags got caught in the lighter, and the technician, ran off dragging a flaming rag across the stage, the follow spot operater, thought it was too good a moment to miss, he zoomed in on th technician, and the show carried on.

 

simple mistakes can lead to disater,

 

like that american night club that was burnt to a sinder, last year, when a rock group decided to use pyro flame cartridges, and set fire to the overhead, polystyriene tiles, I think quite a few died on that occasion.

 

vince

[Techno_Monkey]

Surely the DMX flame is very dangerous! If it is being used on stage for a particular scene, and has been programmed into an LX cue, then does it have a fail safe built in? If it was knocked over then there may not be a quick/easy method for shutting off the fuel?

 

Any ideas anyone?

[SparkySteve]

If it is being used on stage for a particular scene, and has been programmed into an LX cue

I think thats the key word... IF.... anyone with any health and safety knowledge shouldn't even consider programming stuff like that into cues, it needs to be live, stoppable action. Stick it on a sub and let the operator judge if it's safe to use it or not. Like alot of risky things of this nature the H&S won't say don't use them, but they will make damn sure that if you do use them you better have good risk assessments and good nouse about ya. It's very very rare that they'll ban something... they'll make you limit the possibilities of stuff going wrong... hopefully to nothing.... but it should all be in the risk assessment. And if you don't do a good assessment, asnd something does go wrong... expect a jail sentence and a large hefty fine.

 

It's all about common sense.

[Brian]

If it is being used on stage for a particular scene, and has been programmed into an LX cue

I think thats the key word... IF.... anyone with any health and safety knowledge shouldn't even consider programming stuff like that into cues, it needs to be live, stoppable action. Stick it on a sub and let the operator judge if it's safe to use it or not.

The issue is not so much how it is controlled but that fact that DMX is not a very robust protocol. There is no error checking on DMX so the slightest little bit of noise can be interpreted as a valid DMX signal. Any connected device has no way of knowing if it is receiving a valid command.

 

For instance, it is not impossible that a noise pulse of only 4us in duration could turn a DMX flame from off to on, depending how the receiver is implemented.

[James]

In one venue I had serious issues with erronious DMX data being generated when the US bands plugged in or unplugged their 110/240 transformers for their stage equipment. This created huge problems with just the conventionals, I hate to think what would happen if there was the possibility of fire on stage as well.

 

Though saying that I had a friend who - in his back garden for a private party built a DMX gas regulator and had a huge number of bunsen burners flaming away all night on a sound to light routine generated by the lighting desk...

[mike]

Back to the old risk assessments/touring venues for a moment. We have recently contracted an independant fire consultant. He produced a report for us, in addition to our risk assessments.

 

We can write RAs to we're blue in the face, but, (obviously) fire consultants are really good at advising what is safe, and how to put in place really good practices for using and coping with fire onstage.

 

A touring house would probably be much more amenable to accepting fire onstage after consultation (and written evidence) with the experts.

 

A consultant will also only charge a minimal fee for this service, and as consultants, are more specialised in advising like this, instead of you needing to bother the local fire brigade.

 

mike

[Wilf dLampy]

The DMX controlled flame is OK. The system must be set up in such a way that nobody climbs on it or waves their hands where there COULD BE a flame. Just like a permanently-on fire effect. The DMX controls the size of the flame, an incorrectly interpreted signal cannot make the flame go higher than the design, and cannot make it appear somewhere else, or in a different direction (and no strapping them to moving heads ;) )

 

If you need to turn the big efforts off, you flip the switch on the fuel supply (i.e. a dead mans handle)