Montréal International Fireworks Competition Reports

I met with Maria-Grazia Gerbaudo and Pierpaolo Serafino of Panzera SAS to talk about their 27th display in Montreal, a special tribute to The Beatles. With the theme set by Six Flags for the special “Feux d’etoille” series, started in 2009 with a display paying hommage to Cirque du Soleil and then continuing in 2010 with a tribute to Celine Dion; La Ronde’s own technical director, Paul Csukassy, crafted the soundtrack. A big music fan, Paul had created the soundtrack for the Celine Dion show as well as a short Michael Jackson tribute for the 2010 awards ceremony.

Maria-Grazia Gerbaudo and Pierpaolo Serafino

2011 marks a return to the successful formula employed in previous year’s competitions, save for 2010 and 2009, where Panzera SAS provide a full 30 minute show to follow the announcement of the year’s winners. I spoke to Paul Csukassy earlier in the week where he told me that he had spent a whole month assembling the 32 tracks used to pay tribute to The Beatles. Paul is a big Beatles fan and said it was a challenge to find the right pieces from such a vast repertoire and so he focused on songs written by each of the four members of the group and making sure that he used the original versions of these. Hence the soundtrack is divided into four sections representing Ringo, George, John and Paul in that order. Following the selection of the tracks, another two weeks were required in-studio to produce the final edit.

Maria-Grazia told me that they are very happy to be back in Montreal and that they love to put on displays here. The company is unique in that it has shot more displays on the La Ronde site than any other company – this year being their 27th. They also shot a special display to mark the 350th anniversary of Montreal – fired from the Jacques Cartier Bridge – in 1992 as well as a memorable display for the change of millenium, from atop Mont Royal on December 31st, 1999.

Maria-Grazia mentioned that they had been quite busy in July, firing a massive display in Marseilles from a flotilla of 26 barges to celebrate Bastille Day – July 14th.

For this year’s closing display, they had began preparatory work earlier in the year designing special shells, which they were able to test when they received the soundtrack in May. With almost all the shells of Panzera’s manufacture (save for a small amount of Chinese shells from Sunny Internationa), she said that over 90% of the products used were their own. They will be using a lot of traditional cylindrical shells such as Studatas and Maria-Grazia noted that there is no tradition in their part of Italy of using shells larger than 8″ – so that will be the maximum calibre used in their display. I asked if there were any new products this year and she said that they had developed some new colours such as lemon, lilac, aquamarine and orange. There would also be some special surprises in the show, but she wouldn’t elucidate further and encouraged the audience to attend at La Ronde to best savor these surprises. No use is being made of ramp 5 so she told me that there would be nautical shells “of course”.

I asked Pierpaolo about the design of the show and he said he was using traditional Italian techniques – designing by “line” rather than by “cue”. A “line” can be thought of as analogous to a scene in a storyboard. The show has 104 lines. Yanick Roy of Royal Pyrotechnie and Michael Bohonos of Garden City Fireworks provided consultation in the use of the PyroDigital firing system, with Michael entering Pierpaolo’s script into the computer. For the technically minded, the show is being fired with 63 FM16 16-cue firing modules. The cue count sounds low, but it must be remembered that the traditional Italian way of firing shells is to use pyrotechnic time delays. Indeed, this show has rather more cues than the very successful recent show by fellow Italian team, Morsani.

Weather conditions are forecast to be perfect tomorrow so it is with great anticipation that I await the results of the 2011 competition followed by what is sure to be another great display by the Italian masters of Panzera SAS. Pierpaolo said that we should expect a traditional Italian finalé with lots of silver rain and noise!