I met with Nikola Koletcić, representing Croatia with Mirnovec Pirotehnika for the second time following their debut in 2013 when Nikola was a mere 23 years old (along with Damir Belanic who was 25 at the time, making the team one of the youngest ever). Nikola’s father, Franjo, is again on the team.
Since pandemic restrictions started to be eased, Mirnovec are back to being very busy, firing over 200 shows in the two main months of summer. Nikola said this was a special challenge for them competing in Montreal this year as tomorrow his company is doing a huge show to celebrate the opening of the Pelješac Bridge – a display that features 80 firing positions over 2.7km. Due to this, they have to rent firing equipment for their Montreal display and converting from the PyroDigit system they normally use to FireOne added about a month of effort to their preparations.
During the interview, Nikola noted they still have a lot of work to do and I did notice they were still addressing boxes of the many one-shots their display will use. In 2013, their display featured around 2200 cues and this time it will be over 8500 products. Quite the increase in complexity, though Nikola noted the great local crew at La Ronde make a big difference to their task-at-hand.
Their 2013 display feature many flame projectors on ramp 3, but Nikola notice they were not too impressive from the perspective of the audience so will not be using any this time, nor anything on ramp 4. On ramp 3 there will be 21 positions (compared to 15 last time) and there will be five pontoons forming ramp 5. No structures nor set pieces will be used. In terms of products, 70% of the material is from Italy (largely Parente/Pirico with one shots from San Pio too) and the remaining 30% is Mirnovec’s special production from their associated factory in China. Lovers of large calibre shells will be pleased as there will be eight 300mm (12″) shells and these will be fired in “presentation style”.
Nikola worked on both the pyrotechnic design and the soundtrack. He noted it’s difficult to keep audiences engaged for more than about 15 minutes but was sure that his soundtrack would do the job as he believed it to be the strongest in the competition this year. With its theme of dance, it features 13 different styles of dance music and each one will be introduced by an award-winning professional dancer (who is originally from Paris but now lives in Croatia with his Croatian wife). All of the tracks will be roughly the same length (around two and half minutes) and each one will feature unique colours and angles for the one-shots. Nikola noted they will use a wider range this time compared to 2013 as they now know what the site is capable of. He used Finale3D to visualize the entire display, too. At the moment, the weather forecast is perfect for this penultimate show of the competition-proper.