I met with Mark Kelsall, owner and director of Pyrotex Firworx, competing for their first time in Montreal.
Mark said he’d been interested in fireworks all his life and ended up founding Pyrotex in 1999, but whilst working another full-time job. He said he spent all his savings on the company and was also a DJ and semi-professional boxer as well. Eventually the company got a break when they competed at the UK fireworks competition in Southport. He quipped that he said to his then girlfriend that he’d give her the baby she wanted if he won (fully thinking his team would not win). Now his son is 10 years old, going on 11! Pyrotex work the same competition the next year but things didn’t really take off for them until Mark’s friend (and previous Montreal competitor) Graham Wilkinson suggested he compete in Monaco, which the company did, winning in 2012. They won again in 2014 against stiff competition. After this, his dream was to compete to win in Montreal. Mark said it’s not the biggest budget competition in the world (some of the Asian ones that title now) but it’s by far the hardest due to the length. He said 30 minutes is very difficult given the setup time is tight and, with the recent increases in the price of fireworks, the budget is not really high enough anymore.
Mark had visited Montreal in 2019 and worked on the Howard and Sons display – so he already had a feeling for how much work is involved, telling me the show design consumer over 600 hours. Originally it was scheduled for 2020 and the container was packed ready to go. Unfortunately, his storage location got flooded and he lost about 1/3 of the products in the container. To add insult to injury, the shipping company used this year (Hapag-Lloyd) created all sorts of difficulties for Pyrotex meaning that they could not ship the 200, 250 and 300mm finale shells they had intended for the display, due to paperwork issues. He said he also lost time repacking the container because HapagLloyd asked for all the pyro products to be in anti-static bags (which makes no sense as a metal shipping container is already a Faraday cage) plus they refused to include certain Chinese-origin products. This means the show we will see is not quite the one that was designed for 2020, unfortunately.
The show, however, will be complex one with 11 positions on ramp 3 and 7 pontoons forming ramp 5. According to Mark there are 248 FireOne firing modules with 6702 cues and over 10,000 one shots alone with an overall total of 12342(!) items. Products come from Vaccalluzzo (Italy), Zaragozana (Spain), RICASA (Spain), Europla (Spain) and various Chinese companies imported into the UK by Celtic Fireworks. Mark noted that it’s easier to source these from a UK supplier due to the volumes needed for shipping these days.
There will be some surprises in the show and I noticed that various “letter mines” were being setup. Mark said he doesn’t use any visualization software, but he often does drawings of designs. Mark said the soundtrack was chosen such that the audience will immediately recognize the musical tracks so that they get engaged with the display right away. He said the segment he was most anticipating was the “Time to Say Goodbye” one as this is particularly poignant for him – he had lost two close friends unexpectedly, one aged 55 and the other aged 39. We all shed a tear during the interview listening to these sad stories.
On a brighter note, the weather forecast is currently promising for this final in-competition display which is to be shot this coming Wednesday August 3rd.