North Pole Holiday Magic

In the middle of November I was contacted by Original Productions, Inc (http://www.originalproductions.com) who were producing a documentary special on intense holiday decorations for TLC: The Learning Channel (http://tlc.discovery.com). Somehow the Newport Beach Christmas Parade, my name and D25 ended up on their short list of potential subjects. After a telephone interview with the producer and providing some snapshots of previous D25 designs I was selected as one of the subjects of their documentary project that had a working title of ‘Holiday Madness’. This was a follow-up production to the ‘Crazy X-mas Lights’ documentary ( also know as ‘Crazy Christmas Lights’) that first aired on The Learning Channel (TLC) in December of 2006. I postponed the D25 build day to Saturday, December 9 (just 5 days prior to parade day) to accommodate a film crew tasked with following the progress of D25’s transformation. I was quite stressed and nervous having D25 not even started with only 5 days before parade start. While building the 2006 North Pole design, I came up with ideas for the 2007 and 2008 designs. I’d joke during the build that next year’s design will be much easier to build than what we were struggling with this year. Time will tell as each design has it’s own difficult aspects. The film crew returned a week later on Saturday, December 16 to film the finished design and other boats in the parade. I took the cameraman on a cruise to get some close-up shots and the film crew followed me to the starting area for some nighttime parade gathering footage. The 2006 design ‘North Pole ‘ featured over 300 feet of flashing rope light, an inflatable penguin, ice block snow man, sleds, toboggans, igloos, smoke machines and strobes powered by 4 KW of 120VAC power from D25’s twin Honda Eu2000i generators.