Montréal International Fireworks Competition Reports

I met with Michael Lutz, co-designer of the show (his uncle Joe Rozzi is the other co-designer), Maria-Grazia Gerbaudo (Panzera’s Chief Sales Officer), Rudi Fioni (Panzera’s CEO) and Paul Csukassy (designer of the soundtrack and Montreal International Fireworks Competition Technical Director).

This closing show again features the collaboration between Rozzi and Panzera SRL. Rozzi are both customers and collaborators, being the main importer of Panzera products in the United States as well as providing collaboration with Panzera in terms of putting on large-scale displays. Michael said that was a busy year again for the Rozzi company and that business has been growing by over 40% since the height of the pandemic. Michael said that this would be one of their largest displays of the year, except for their “home” show of Riverfest in Cincinnati. For this display, Michael and his uncle Joe split the design work roughly 50/50 – Michael noting that he did the opening and his uncle, who is 100% Italian, the finale. Michael said he feels that he’s not as good as his uncle at scripting those!

For the soundtrack, as has been the case for many years now, Paul Csukassy worked on the montage of this. He said it took more than two months from start to finish and he managed to send Michael the almost-final draft at the end of June. Paul said he likes Coldplay, but is not familiar with all their works. For the soundtrack, he went through their catalog and selected and initial thirty or so tracks, including one that will be released in October, and edited these down to the 15 used in the display. For the finale, he selected the appropriately named “A Sky Full of Stars” and Michael also noted that he has used this and other Coldplay pieces before. Paul, being a musician, said he spent quite a lot of time in making sure the transitions between the tracks made sense from both a rhythmic and musical perspective, so that not only would the beats line up, but also correct chord progressions. He said he used the talents of Studio Piccolo/ to help with this refinement task. Paul said he chose a range of rhythms and paces for the display to give a good variety and said he had had some specific effects in mind for certain places, but left the bulk of the pyrotechnic design to Michael and Joe. There had been comments made as to why, for example, Les Cowboys Fringant had not been selected as the band for the closing tribute. Paul explained that, as much as he and everyone else in Quebec loves their music, it would be difficult to make a successful pyromusical with it. His approach is to make sure the music and fireworks are a harmonious whole pyromusical, rather than just fireworks with music. A fireworks with music approach would only be a success for fans of that particular music, but a pyromusical, when designed properly, should be an entertaining whole in and of itself.

For the design, Michael said it took around five full days of scripting, though he had listened to the soundtrack for some time in advance of working on the pyrotechnic design, split roughly 50/50 with his uncle Joe Rozzi. They made use of Finale3D for some of the visualization, but Michael noted that the program is much more than that and they use it to fully manage their inventory and production process. He said this saves them an awful lot of time in preparing and packaging shows, especially during their busiest period around the July 4th celebrations.

On the technical side, all ramps except 4 will be used, with five pontoons for ramp 5 and 11 positions on ramp 3. A total of approximately 4200 cues will be used and the display will be fired with a FireOne system. Most of the shells (around 90%) are being sourced from Panzera and will include new effects this year including disco ghost shells and special medusas. The rest of shells are from Ikon, the Chinese line of the Australian company Foti’s International Fireworks. Michael noted that these have a strong South Italian flavour to them. All of the one-shots and candles are also from Panzera. Fans of large shells will be happy there are three very special 300mm shells as well as quite a few 200mm. Of course, Panzera make a lot of large cylinder shells and so we will, of course, see these in the display.

Speaking of Panzera, I spoke to both Rudi Fioni (Panzera’s CEO) and Maria Grazia Gerbaudo (Panzera’s Chief Sales Officer) about their push towards more ecological fireworks. For some time now the company has been trying to eliminate plastic and replace it with paper, but this is not as simple as it sounds as around 50% of the “paper” used in fireworks shells is, in fact, glue produced from petrochemical sources. Rudi explained that this means it is not as ecological as it might seem and also leads to it taking a long time to decompose in the environment. Panzera partnered with a company Rudi had been involved in that fabricates a special type of 3D-printable material that can be used to replace both plastic and paper in the production of fireworks. Its physical properties are similar to plastic, but it’s entirely made from the inedible part of grains such as rice. Because of this, it is 100% compostable and decays quickly and cleanly in the environment. At the moment, it’s more expensive than paper, but Rudi noted that shell-pasting machines that use paper tape are quite expensive so that, even though this material is more expensive, the saving in time and labour costs offsets this very effectively. He also said that they are continuing to remove potassium perchlorate from their products and have entire product lines that are 100% perchlorate-free.

Despite some heavy rain today, the weather conditions should be good for this final display in the 38th season of the Montreal International Fireworks Competition. I’d like to personally thank everyone at La Ronde, and all of the competitors, for their gracious accommodation and their time in allowing me to interview them.