I met with Francesco Massuco and Michele Parente of A.P.E. Parente Romulado, competing in Montreal for their first time.
Founded at the end of the 1980s, A.P.E. Parente are fourth generation fireworkers, the name Romulado being the great grandfather of the company’s patriarch, Michele, who also designed both the soundtrack and the script for Saturday’s show. Having won other competitions in Canada in the past (Toronto in 1992, as well as Vancouver and Montmorency Falls near Quebec City as well as Gatineau), they felt that it was time to come to Montreal. To this end, Francesco visited in 2013 and they received the invitation at the start of this year.
As manufacturers, they spent about one month specially making the product for the show and at least another month on the sound design and scripting. 80% of the material used in A.P.E. Parente, with most of the rest coming from other Italian manufacturers such as Martarello and the remainder coming from Chinese factories that have joint ventures with Italian companies.
A.P.E. Parente put on around 450 displays per year, including 94 during the time they were designing and manufacturing for Montreal. They told me that Montreal is not their largest show of the year as they have displays in Venice and Sardinia that are at least twice as large.
A lot of the shells used will be traditional Italian multibreaks, with the largest calibre use being 250mm (10″). They will be firing the show using 420 PyroDigiT modules and will have over 3000 one-shots in the display for a total cue count close to 5000. All ramps will be used, with five positions on ramp 2, eighteen positions on ramp 3 and ten positions on ramp 5. Michele told me that his typical pyromusical uses largely Italian classical music with some Italian pop, so this rock-n-roll soundtrack is his first in this genre. He said that he wanted to use music that hadn’t been used much in Montreal before and did quite a lot of research to come up with the soundtrack. There will be nauticals in the show and some special structures as well – to be revealed on show-day. No simulation or visualization software was used in the design of the show.
Michele said that a one-line invitation to the public to attend his show would be “Spero di fare bauare Montreal” – which means he is inviting Montrealers to come and dance! The weather forecast is excellent so there is no excuse not to attend!