I met with Kelly Guille, president and chief designer at Archangel Fireworks, competing in Montreal for their first time.
Kelly has been with Archangel for 22 years and helped the company transition from selling various items including fireworks to one that became a pure pyrotechnics company. Kelly essentially bought out the fireworks division eleven years ago, becoming president and has since put the company on the international map by winning competitions in Vancouver (taking first prize in 2007), Quebec City (first prize in 2009), Sherbrooke (first prize in 2007 and 2014). Sirius Fireworks (which is a joint venture between Patrick Brault and Kelly Guille) produces both the Festival of Lights competition in Vancouver as well as GlobalFest in Calgary.
Kelly said he has wanted to compete in Montreal for a while and does have experience with the competition, having designed Zambelli’s show in 2011 together with Sirius Pyrotechnic’s Patrick Brault, who is on the crew with Archangel. Also on the crew is Luis Brunchù, who worked with Patrick on Sirius’s Montreal display in 2012 and who works with Archangel every summer now.
A further collaboration is that Sirius Pyrotechnics have opened a factory in Mexico which is the first that is exporting products to North America, particularly the large calibre shells that are now becoming prohibitively expensive to ship from Asia. With a chemist who had worked in Spain at several factories, production is of typical Spanish-style effects and many of these will be show cased in Montreal in the Archangel display, some of which have recently become homologated in Canada. The Sirius factory also produces its own blackpowder as well.
In terms of products used, all of the 10″ shells (20) and 12″ shells (8) are from Mexico as well as 60% of the approximately 90 8″ shells. Other manufacturers represented include Ang Ping, Vulcan (for whom Archangel are a distributor in Canada), Dancing Dragon, Mystical, Vincent Caballer, Ricasa, Grupo Luso and some Pyrofantasia. The display will be fired using approximately 80 32-cue FireOne firing modules.
Kelly said he is as “excited as hell” to be competing in Montreal and this will be his largest show to date. He mentioned the longevity of the competition as a motivating factor and noted it’s a pleasure to be part of this history. He was sure winning the other competitions mentioned early help put Archangel on the map and raised awareness of the company enough to be invited to Montreal.
The idea for the theme of the display had occurred to Kelly a couple of years ago and was based on the “No World For Tomorrow” track in the playlist. He said he quite likes musically “dark” displays, but believes this one will not be too dark and will have plenty for the audience to latch onto, even if they’re not familiar with all the pieces. Kelly has used Sean Proctor, a long time friend and sound engineer, to master the soundtrack – as he had done for all his winning displays to date. He noted that despite the “end of the world” connotation of Armageddon, for many people, such an event is viewed as a rebirth.
In terms of pyrotechnical design, there will be no set pieces nor ramp 5, due to the large number of nauticals. There will be some 270 degree “lollipops” though. Kelly said some visualization was used, but mainly to verify the timing of the one-shot sequences. He said it took a couple of months to complete the design, partially due to some re-work that was required as certain products that he had planned to used turned out to be unavailable. When asked which segments he was most looking forward to seeing, he said there were various, for different reasons, including seeing some of the new Mexican products in a large display setting for the first time.
Finally, asked to provide a “one liner” to entice people to come to La Ronde to see the Archangel display, Kelly said: “This is a design for me and people who want something different – the [sound]track is not just another Yellow River”. Finally, he said I want people to “just watch the damn show!”.