Anyone who’s been to Disneyland Paris and stayed for the dazzling Star Wars: A Galactic Celebration may well wonder just what’s involved in pulling this vibrant show together. Enter Marie-Charlotte Bientz, producer and Michael Mulato, stage manager of Galactic Celebration who explain just what’s involved.
“Star Wars: A Galactic Celebration” combines many different means of expression: the stage with the characters, the video, the projections, the sound, not to mention the visual effects and pyrotechnics. How is it all synchronized?
M: Everything is coordinated by a “time code,” a kind of very precise stopwatch, like on most major current shows, and all the effects, whether video, lasers and pyrotechnics, are programmed from this count. For example, we know that at 12 minutes, 3 seconds and 10 frames, there must be such an effect, and so on throughout the show.
MC: And this time code is guided by music. Audio is the conductor of all our shows. Natalia Beliaeva, the director of “Star Wars: A Galactic Celebration,” has a great musical sensitivity. This is felt in the way he stages characters and images. It comes from movement, from music. And music flows from video, lasers, light, and pyrotechnics. We were particularly attentive to the way of combining all these elements around the music. On Star Wars, it is all the most important that the score of John Williams is very, very rich and offers a lot of possibilities. The magic of this show is to carry the audience in a movement, to give them the impression, while being static, of flying towards this distant galaxy, very distant.
It’s a great read, especially for anyone lucky enough to have visited and experienced the park so read on.
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