“Ferrari’s for everybody!” an article about the grand opening of Ferrari world. «

Mar

2011

“Ferrari’s for everybody!” an article about the grand opening of Ferrari world.

Ferrari’s for everybody!

The Arena where the magic happened. Photo by Seth Ericsson.

On the 30th November last year, Visual act were in Abu Dhabi to help out with another groovy live event.

Ferrari has built a theme park on Yas Island, right next to the recently christened Formula One race track. Have a look on Google earth, Ferrari world is the enormous red building beside the racetrack. This theme park boasts not only the largest roof in the world and the largest Ferrari emblem, but the fastest rollercoaster ever built.

The grand opening of Ferrari world was an ambitious show that had thirty minutes to tell the story of the evolution of Ferrari; the main theme was the essence of Ferrari with the fusion of Power and Elegance. Power was represented by the black Arabian racing horse and elegance an excerpt from the opera “Madame Butterfly” with full orchestra. The opening scene was of an underwater paradise and paid homage to the host land with the depiction of the ancient art of Pearl diving. The pearl divers were connected to Visual act winches and the effect was that they would swim down from the surface of the ocean and collect pearls from the stage floor (sea bed).

Later in the show the acrobats changed costume and became spacemen tumbling through space and time. The resting position of the spacemen depicted the star constellation of Pegasus (horse, do you see the connection). After the space section the acrobats changed costume again and had to represent Power in the shape of an internal combustion engine. The acrobats became Pistons and moved up and down in synchronization with a projected crank shaft. The ten acrobats moved up and down with an eight meter stroke. It was the best representation of a human piston crankshaft I have ever seen.

Then the show turns toward Elegance with beautiful opera singing and an acrobat on a tissue (big stretchy bit of fabric). The tissue was connected to one of our winches and it raised the acrobat to 15 Meters where she performed very elegantly to the opera.

The show climaxed with a phenomenal fireworks display and everybody was happy. The show was witnessed by all of the top Ferrari people and non other than the Sheik of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Al Khalifa. He was very happy with the show and bought Ferrari’s for everybody.

So no matter if you want to fly a camera, a person or a group of people miming an internal combustion engine for the opening theme park, Visual act can provide the motion for your notion.

The show was performed using the Visual act Stage Control System and 8 of our standard winches, each with a load capacity of 250 kg, 2,0 m/s and 60m stroke.