121 posts tagged “video”

What happens with a former fireworks display company owner has a birthday? A huge show of course!

I got a phone call a couple weeks ago from John asking if I'd help on a show for his birthday. I hadn't had any smoke in a while so I would have done it anyway, but when he told me they would be shooting 12" nothing would keep me away.

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The show had about 2,500 shells, including several 12" shells and a gold section several minutes long. There were probably 25 people helping set up that morning, the racks and sandboxes were done in previous days. The shells were all ematched and marked ahead of time, with tubes marked with corresponding numbers, so setup went fairly smoothly and efficiently. All we had to do that day was drop the shells in the right tube and wire everything up, so after about four and a half hours we were almost done. I had been hoping to get a picture of myself holding a 12" shell because there probably won't be many chances for that in the future, but they had already been dropped the previous day.

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There were plenty of pyros there and I had some work to do back home, so I left once things were mostly set up and returned about 45 minutes before showtime (7:30, it sure gets dark early now, a nice change from summer as long as weather cooperates). This time I got to just sit back in my chair and watch the show, without doing any post-show work.

The show was efired with a nailboard and was a lot of fun. It wasn't tightly scripted, but there was some good variety, big salutes, great big shells, nice false finales and a huge finale. The several minutes of gold was a little repetitive and went a little long in my opinion, but was still pretty cool. The show lasted over 30 minutes, which is probably the longest show I've seen and things were always happening.

(Video links at bottom of post)

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John4

If you look at the date on the last post, you can see I've been pretty lazy about blogging recently, even with a couple shows to post. I've had a lot of other stuff going on that hasn't left much room for pyro and now the season is pretty much over! Hopefully I find a few chances to light some stuff soon and get back in the groove.

Anyway, here is a show that happened more than a month ago and I'm just now posting... I'll just make this a quick one without too many comments just to get it done. This was the second of two shows Wolverine West did at Fircrest this summer, though I didn't make it to the first. The show was almost all 1.4G except for a bunch of 1.75" salutes and other similar small 1.3G items, as well as the same mines used in the Covington show. Here are a few pictures of the setup (click to embiggen):

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I was up at my cabin this weekend and wanted to play with a few fountains. It is very dry up there and "technically" (....) there is a burn ban, so I needed to be extra careful. I decided not to try out the larger BC fountains I purchased at Firecracker Alley this year, and would stick to the much smaller Jack In The Box and Happiness fountains (as well as keeping the hose on hand). Despite the different sizes of all the fountains in that picture, Purple Rain will probably be the best performer... I also lit a box of the tiny Amazing Fountains on July 4th and found them quite entertaining. Anyway, here is my sweet pyro for the weekend...

Happiness Fountain (Phantom) - Probably a generic, but this one has a Phantom label. I wasn't expecting whistle in something this small and it kind of annoyed me (especially because I was trying to be sneaky). It was actually kind of impressive how many effects they fit in that little thing. It came in a box of six, but they are all the same color and probably the same effect.

Victory Fireworks is one of the wholesale vendors at Muckleshoot this year (same place the Northwest Pyro demo was at) and shot a small demo on Saturday that I was able to attend.

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The demo was fairly small (32 items on the shoot list) and there weren't that many people there, but it was still a nice little pyro adventure even if I just watched. A few other PyroU guys were there, including mindset/Tim, tjfireworks, and I even ran into Tony and Larry, which I wasn't expecting!

The selling season at the reservation has started now, but because it is still early, only about half (or less) of the stands there were actually open. I walked around a little, but didn't look too closely because I wasn't going to spend any money and didn't want to deal with pushy salespeople. I was surprised at how many random people were there shooting fireworks, most in very unsafe ways. It wasn't a good place to be if you value your life! There were salute cakes, rockets, shells, and ground salutes going on left and right, and all other items being shot every once in a while. Some were in a field next to the stands, but others were spread all over the parking lot and you had to drive through them to get to the wholesale area. One guy was even angling large salute rockets over the demo site, which was not appreciated. I can only imagine how crazy it gets closer to (or on) the 4th, and wouldn't want to be anywhere near there without a very good reason.

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Ok, I've been meaning to post about the WA spring group shoot for a while and haven't done it. At this point it is pretty late and I'm feeling lazy, so this will be a short one. I have a Dixie Cup for your tears...

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This year was different from previous group shoots because it was a two-day event, as well as being at a slightly different location. Steve gets big points as usual for hosting the event.

Day one was single items, starting with more demo stuff that Steve is carrying as part of his wholesale deal with Hales. He shot some stuff I saw at the last demo, but also quite a few different items. Jeff/boaty also shot a lot of product, mainly Winda.

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Spirit of 76 showed up with a big truck full of fireworks to deliver the WA portion of the PyroU group buy. They have been very helpful to PyroU and great to work with.

I got video of most single items that night, so just go look at my PyroU gallery for them if you haven't already...

I was planning on spending the night instead of doing the two hour drive home to turn around and do it again the next morning, but my car was already so full that I couldn't fit another case, and I planned to buy more! I drove back and unloaded, it was much more comfortable sleeping in a bed!

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The next day I got there around lunch time and we had plenty of time to hang out and BS. We had a BBQ and plenty of time to buy more stuff and build boards for the group show.

We had various smaller items to play with during the daytime and I purchased some firecrackers and several different types of whistling rockets to kill some time, which were fun.

Finally it got dark (although in the interest of finishing at a reasonable time we started too early while it wasn't really dark yet) and we got to the important stuff. We had more single items to demo, including one each of most of the full cases I purchased from 76. I was happy to see that Spicy Hot performs very close to Global Dominance, and Hot Wire was awesome. Three at once is going to look great in my next show!

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For the group show people made various boards and then we just lit them in sequence. It wasn't too fancy, but it was much simpler than trying to organize a ton of loose product and fuse it all or handfire every cake individually.

My board (which took two pieces of plywood) is shown here. It started with The New Hotness + Deja Blue + Bada Bing, then to 2x Super Stallion + 9x Megabanger comet cakes + 2x Wild West, ending on Fire in the Hole + 4x Thug. I hadn't built a board in a while and didn't spend much time measuring fuse, so I just hoped everything would go.

The group show ended up looking great, with Yuri/cracker54 lighting each board. Mine worked quite well, so I was happy! The show ended on around 500 shells in a bunch of racks and only one shell didn't fire! After the show was over, just around everyone helped clean up and we hung out around the fire of spent cakes for a while and went home happy.

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I got my own video of the 2009 Renn Fayre fireworks show, but also had somebody with much fancier gear like (multiple) real video cameras and tripods help me out by getting another video. He has a lot of experience videoing fireworks shows and the results are fantastic!

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I've been posting about it pretty much since the smoke cleared from the Renn Fayre 2008 fireworks, and on Saturday May 2nd, I finally shot the 2009 show. It didn't quite live up to my high hopes because of weather-related problems, a couple scripting issues, and the fact that it wasn't the dramatic change of last year, but looking back at it, I'm fairly happy overall and the crowd seemed to enjoy it.

Short background for the various people reading this: Renn Fayre is the end of classes party at Reed College in Portland, OR. I graduated last year, and got them to put me in charge of the show, working with Wolverine West Fireworks. This year I came back as an alum to do it again and hope to keep doing it every year they'll have me back.

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[This is a very long post, so if you just want the video, skip to the bottom. I've spent so much time working on this show that there is a lot to get out, even if I don't expect anyone else to read this or care. The next section will be setup, then a bit on music, then a breakdown of the show by sections.]

Setup

The basic show was pretty similar to last year. It was e-fired to music (more on the the music later) on the same field, with five positions spaced 40' apart. Last year included a few small 1.3G (professional class for non-pyros reading this) items, but this year was entirely 1.4G, meaning every firework in the show could be purchased at a fireworks stand in Washington (but not Oregon!). I'm continually impressed by the quality of 1.4G, even after everything I've shot. At the right distance and with a well designed show, good 1.4G looks just as good as some of the professional products.

We had the setup better organized than last year, and got on the field shortly after noon to get to work, which was great. We had a good crew of eight or nine people and I can't thank them enough for the hard work of putting to show together.

Above - Blue skies for the moment, with a huge pile of fireworks ready to be laid out and hooked up.

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There was light rain in the forecast for much of the day, so we did our best to be prepared. Every item was wrapped in carpet film to try and keep water out, the cakes can then fire right through the plastic.

Right - Cakes at one position wrapped.

Wrapping each item was a very valuable precaution, but took a long time. Each item was already marked with a cue and ematched, which helped speed things up, but many of the ematches were short ones that needed to have their lead wires extended to reach the rails, which also added time to the setup.

We had light drizzle on and off, but later in the afternoon the sky got much darker and we got hit with some of the hardest rain I've seen in a long time. On top of that were wind and lightning, which struck and took down a tree about 200' from where we were working. All we could do was hope that the fireworks already out survived, and that the light plastic tarp covering all the fireworks that we hadn't wrapped yet stayed on. A couple guys got in the trailer, the rest of us lowered the tent and held the corners to keep it from blowing away and exposing more fireworks, all while getting soaked from the rain coming in sideways.

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Left - Heavy rain, guys hiding in the trailer and  product under the plastic sheet. Luckily we had the fire extinguishers.

The rain eventually stopped and the sky started to clear up, but we had lost a lot of time at this point. Combined with worries about how well things survived the rain, I was getting worried that we wouldn't get everything finished in time. I worked as fast as I could to get the rest of the shells and mines ready to be loaded into the racks, then had to go check the rails to see if we at least had something plugged into each cue, and found several things to fix.

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By 8pm we had most of the fireworks set out, but still hadn't set up the audio or done continuity tests to make sure all the electrical systems were all connected and working. The cakes and individually cued shells and mines were almost all in place, so I ran around trying to get all the fountains for the finale buildup plugged in. I also had almost 80 shells for the last cue of the finale that still needed to be quickmatched and loaded into racks, by this point it was almost 9pm and obvious it was too late to get them loaded. We confirmed that all the modules were connected, but ran out of time before we could really check that every item was properly connected.

I was very stressed out at this point, but it was now too late to do anything about it (even to hit the beer garden for a few minutes to try and relax), so I just joined the crowd and hoped for the best.

At least the rain stopped a couple hours before showtime and I got a couple nice rainbow pictures before it got dark...

The Music

Last year, the music in the show was all from the band Explosions in the Sky. I wanted to do something different from the usual classic rock/pop that is used in most fireworks shows, and always felt their music would work well for fireworks. They are all instrumental, which I felt would help keep the fireworks as the focus, rather than worrying too much about the lyrics or meaning of the songs.

I tried to do something similar this year, making the soundtrack entirely from songs by Sigur Ros. Their music is similarly grand but also has some playfulness to it, especially on the last two albums. The lyrics are all in Icelandic or their made-up "Hopelandic," so it didn't distract from the fireworks and instruments. While I love ( ) and their other older stuff, every song but one was from their two most recent albums, Takk... and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. I was tempted to throw in something more obscure to show the cool kids that I'm not a n00b, but songs like Dánarfregnir og jarðarfarir (or if you want to get super hardcore, Fjöll í austri fagurblá) don't really fit a fireworks show.

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The Show

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Direct link to cue sheet here: PDF file

The rain and lack of time to check everything meant that we had a 10-20% failure rate, which was unfortunate. In most cases it wasn't a huge deal, but other times it lead to some black sky, which is the nightmare of all pyros.

If you know the product you can follow along with the cue sheet and video linked below, but for the comments on each section, I will be refering to the time on the videos, not the cue sheet. I mention specific parts and items that worked well, but a lot of it is noting what didn't work, so there are lots of gory details.

1. Takk... - A nice way to get attention and all three fountains worked, with some nice silver sparks and decent height.

2. Gobbledigook - A mistake right away, the mines were supposed to be timed to match the opening guitar chords of the song, and they were all a couple seconds early. This happened on pretty much every mine in the show, which was incredibly frustrating because they were supposed to be my most accurately timed effect of the whole show. I think I screwed up when I translated the script I wrote from Excel into the fireworks script program... Just Light It (UP) is a great cake, but only two of three fired. Next up was supposed to be two 4 Tons of Fun #3 (UP), but they didn't fire, leading to a lot of black sky. As you can hear in the video, I was rather aggravated. At least the pair of shells broke right on cue (1:04) From here I was convinced everything was ruined, and had a hard time enjoying the things that did go right, so that was kind of a bummer. Razzle Dazzle (UP, starts about 1:39) was great, I wish I used more of them. Two of four Golden Willows at 2:30 didn't fire, but it still looked pretty good and the XO1 crackling willow shells at 2:38 were great. All three Killer in the Mist (UP) fired and are amazing for a 200g cake, but a High and Mighty (UP) that wasn't supposed to be here also started firing, so while everything else ended on cue (including a nice five shell volley of XO2s), that cake kept going long past the music.

3. Inní mér syngur vitleysingur - Only two of three Flying Fish with Zoom Power (WW) fired at the start of this song, but it still looked great. The mines at 4:49 were supposed to go a couple seconds later after the pause and right when the music picks up again, but it still looked fantastic and everything ended pretty much on cue.

4. Hoppípolla - The Blue Tie with Brocade Mine (WW) at the start of this section were supposed to be angled in V's, but I forgot with all my running around. Falling Water Chutes (WW) is a very elegant cake, though only two of three fired at 6:08. The timing at 6:53 worked perfectly, but the intended drama didn't quite work out when only one of three H2O (WW) fired at 7:02. 7:26 was supposed to be two PPS-8 (UP), but I couldn't get them, so this bit was a little repetitive. Almost every shell in the next part fired, and the XO1's looked great as usual. The two Gold Diggin Blonde (UP) were nice, but had a much longer duration than I had scripted, and went over the song. The three 3" Brocade Willows had nice large breaks with good hang time.

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5. Sæglópur - The mines at the start of this song were early like the others, they were supposed to go on the piano chords. Three Eye of the Storm (UP) were supposed to fire at the same time, and while only two went, they still looked fantastic. Following that (0:29) was supposed to be three Red White and Bluetiful (UP), but only one fired. It is still pretty impressive by itself, so it wasn't the end of the world. Only one of two Catalyst (RR) fired at 0:50, which was disspointing because I bought two specifically for the show months ago, but it was covered up well by the 200g cakes. The mines in the next section were of course off, with one missing. Only two of three Pow Bam fired after that, but the breaks on that cake are great, so it still looked good. All three Thug fired, with the crackle getting a good response as usual. One of the Yin Yang at 2:14 stopped firing at one row and the third High and Mighty is missing because it fired earlier in the show, but the end of the song looked pretty good and ended on time.

6. Olsen Olsen - Vendetta (GG) is a pretty nice little cake, and the crackle shells at 3:23 broke right on cue, which was great. The popcorn crackle breaks in Curtain Call (BP) starting at 3:40 were absolutely massive and surprised even me (the size, not the effect!), as well as getting a big reaction from the audience. The cakes following Curtian Call were two Pro Blue and one Pro Red (Bigs), but one blue didn't fire and the other one didn't fire the last few shots.

7. Festival - Here you can see why Gimmie Shimmy (WW) is one of my favorite cakes, with great glitter, timing and firing pattern. One of my 4 Tons of Fun cakes was the wrong one (the labels are very similar), but it wasn't a problem and the Pyro Gumbo (PP) added some nice hard breaks. This was intended as a false finale, but wasn't really much bigger than some other sections earlier in the show, so I guess I didn't plan that very well and the false finale last year was probably more impressive.

8. Glósóli - The building to the finale was supposed to be an expanding triangle of fountains, while I didn't get them all set up in time, it still sort of worked. The mines went early as usual, but everything else started on cue. The breaks from BMF (Bigs) were huge and a nice addition I picked up. Three New Dimension (GB) and five Pow Bam added lots of big breaks to the end, but I feel like I didn't have enough intensity or a fast enough pace towards the end, I could have used another case of 500g and one or two more cases of 200g at the very end. If I had time to fuse in the finale barrage shells (30 WC Super Mag w/Tail and 48 UP Mega Pyro) it would have made a big difference, so it was dissapointing that they didn't make it in. I was happy to see that pretty much everything ended right on cue.

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So that was the show in text form, which is always fascinating... I was stressed out from a long day of work and getting soaked, so the first few problems really frustrated me and colored my view of the whole show. Going back and watching the video, I'm a lot happier with how things turned out overall, especially given the difficult circumstances. Hopefully next year I'll have a chance to get more things right. After all, I ordered some fireworks several months ago that I plan on using for Renn Fayre 2010!

You can stop skipping the rest of this post, the video is finally here

The videos can also be found in my PyroU gallery.

Part 1 (direct link 55MB .avi)
Part 2 (direct link 50MB .avi)

Thank you to my wife for getting the video. I should also have a higher quality video (all one shot! a tripod!) in a month or so.

Update: A higher quality video of the show can be found here.

The finale at the NW Pyro demo was very cool and a more traditional sky-puke style finale, the other main option is larger numbers of a single item or series of items, as in the Victory Fireworks demo. This one is a huge number of 200g Red and Silver Razzle, followed by 200g Gold Brocade Bash, then 500g Gold Fever (all PYK).

I was going to do a longer post, but it has already been a couple days and time is short! So the short version is Steve and associates are wholesaling for Hales this year, and shot a demo at the Muckleshoot Casino. PyroU folks were invited to help out and good times were had.

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We had something like ten PyroU guys show up, which made for quite a crew. I'm not sure what time other people got there, but a lot of the work was already done when I arrived around 5:30pm. Demo cakes were laid out and racks were being fused to demo shells. Up front were some fountains, candles and other small items.

Left - Fusing racks with slow visco for the demo. Shells shot in the demo included Area 51 and Redline from Pyro Predator (both great) and Gladiator from Golden Bear (great colors and effects, but not marked!)

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Right - Lots of cakes set out to demo. There were around 20 200g cakes, hald a dozen shell kits and two dozen 500g cakes.

Favorite 200g cakes from the demo:
1. Pyro Gumbo (Pyro Predator) - Huge breaks and big spread, sort of like a fanned Matrix Pyro. I have two of these in my show coming up.
2. I Love USA (Golden Bear) - Fanned red white and blue peonies, crackle finale. Good color and spread.
3. Hit and Run (Golden Bear) - Crackle mines and whistles to peony with crackle. Long duration (maybe a little slow) and nice size breaks. The breaks are sort of like a mini Global Dominance.

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Left - Setting up the finale, with four rows of quick viscoed cakes, mostly 200g with a few 500g in there. Ending in maybe 100 shells of various kinds.

Favorite 500g cakes from the demo:
1. Global Dominance (Pyro Predator) - I've seen this cake before and have ordered a rewrap I hope is just as good. Huge breaks, massive crackle finale.
2. Fire in the Hole (Shotgun) - Layered mines to a variety of fanned effects. Very nice.
3. Super Stunt (Winda) - Some of the biggest breaks of the night.

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While working at the magazines, Rod and I also did a couple tests on fences as safety barriers. We've had a couple of cakes that tipped (even when glued to a board) or blew out, so in the interest of safety we wanted to look at ways to reduce this danger. At the last Sumner show we used a plywood box, but it was a pain to put together, required a lot of heavy material, and just wasn't that practical. We thought about possible alternatives and decided to look at fences that could be pounded into the group and rolled up when we were done, so we needed to test it and see how well it would actually work.

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We looked around Home Depot and got a 100' roll of silt fence with stakes attached, and another roll of plastic fencing material that looked like plastic chicken wire. The silt fence I'm used to seeing has metal wire and this didn't, but we figured we'd see what happened. The material is a fairly thin woven plastic stapled to stakes every ten feet. The other fence came in a 25' roll and was flexible plastic with openings of about 1/2".

For the first test we used a 200g cake, Golden Willows (not pictured). It was tipped flat to the ground and then supported with stakes on the back and sides. The fence was pounded in the ground in a square all around it, with the cake 4-5 feet from the fence. I lit the cake and it contained the first couple shots, but then flipped itself upright and fired the rest of the shots straight up! The one time you want a cake shooting sideways and it doesn't... I didn't get the first shots on video, so I won't bother posting it. The damaged was limited to a few pretty small holes that didn't show up very well in the picture.

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For the next test we used another Dahlias & Bouquets with the green plastic fencing. This fencing looked pretty sturdy and I expected it would do a better job of stopping the shells than the silt fence, although with the larger openings I didn't think it would do much to stop the mines.

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To keep things simple we kept three sides of the silt fence and just used the green fence on the one side the cake would be facing, and used shooting wire to attach it to three stakes. This fence didn't do much for the mines as expected. But while it contained a few shots, it was clear right away that more were getting through than with the silt fence. There was less immediately visible damage, but we found quite a few holes in the fence, and seeing the shells break outside the fence was pretty obvious. While the openings in the fence are too small for almost any cake insert, the plastic seems to be too soft and weak to reliably contain anything, an insert only has to break one or two "wires" of the fence to make a hole large enough to fit through. The woven material of the silt fence is a lot stronger in this respect.

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