Interview with Team Hands

Hands Fireworks, Canada’s oldest pyrotechnics company (founded in 1873 by William Hands) last competed in Montreal at the inaugural competition in 1985. Returning for the 35th anniversary edition of the competition, they are performing the out-of-competition opening show, with a themed entitled ‘1985 Nostalgia’ – appropriate for their long awaited return.

Guillaume Chartier and Jason Robillard

I met with Guillaume Chartier (show designer) and Jason Robillard (Production Manager) to talk about this special opening show.

Hands used to be a fireworks manufacturer in Canada, but now have a relationship with the Chinese company Lidu. 90% of the products used in the display are essentially Hands (from Lidu or their old Canadian manufactured stock) and all of these are homologated for use in Canada. The other 10% are from Vincente Caballer (Spain, but their factory is closed) together with Jingsheng (China), Mystical (China) and some NextFX (USA).

Guillaume and Jason explained that, since this is the out-of-competition opening show, there would not be any special structures or the use of ramp 5, but there would still be surprises in the show. Guillaume has a unique design style, favouring mines over one shots – this display will feature almost 800 of these in calibres from 46mm up to 100mm. There will also be a large number of nautical shells and cakes.

For the soundtrack, Guillaume told me he went through all of the music charts of 1985 to pick the songs used and was happy to find that that year was a very rich one musically. Jason couldn’t remember it in person as he hadn’t even been conceived at the time, but Guillaume had some memories of it. He told me he used Finale 3D to design the show and had an audio-engineer friend complete the mixing of the soundtrack. Hands had competed in the Philippines International Pyromusical Competition in 2017 and 2018, placing joint 3rd and Jason said this Montreal display was their largest show of 2019 and the largest since their PIPC entries. They noted the scale of the show would be larger than the usual opening show and would be more on-par with an actual competition show, featuring 4500 products fired by 2500 cues using 200 PyroDigital modules.

For aficionados of technical information the show will feature

  • 949 75mm shells
  • 1328 100mm
  • 539 125mm
  • 354 150mm
  • 20 175mm
  • 29 200mm
  • 10 250mm

as well as around 277 cakes and slices and around 800 mines and 570 one shots and candles.1985 Nostalgia

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