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 Montreal Fireworks Forum —› 2009 Display Reviews —› Interview with Team Fireworks For Africa
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Posted: Aug 5, 2009 17:47:12

The final interview in the competition proper was with Nick Mitri, founder of Fireworks for Africa and chief designer, both of the fireworks and the soundtrack. Unusually, Fireworks For Africa also competed in the Vancouver and Montmorency Falls competitions this year - normally this is prohibited under the Montreal Competition rules but a special exception was made in order to complete the multi-continental nature of this year's International des Feux.

Nick claimed to be unused to giving interviews but then proceeded to give lots of interesting information about their upcoming display. All the material is produced by Ricardo Caballer (Ricasa) and shipped directly from Spain. Nick said they do this with all their out-of-Africa displays as it greatly simplifies the logistics. Nick is personal friends with a key Ricasa employee and so he said that he had requested some special products for his show.

For the technically minded, they will be using a German-made wireless firing system from a company called Galaxis. This is in an interesting system with firing modules that fire either 10 lines or can be simply converted by plugging in a matrix board to fire 100. Fireworks For Africa do a lot of close-proximity shows and find this wireless system is very flexible for their needs and even has the capability to have small wireless units mounted on performers. The show will use 27 of the 100 cue matrices with a total of about 2500 cues. The way Nick designs shows lead us to some confusion in what was meant by a cue as he said there are 197 in the show - looking at the tables he had for the show design indicated that a cue in this context is a row in the table which describes that part of the tableaux being fired.

Nick said he felt, as a small company, his show may be smaller than others but that he wanted to use as wide a variety of pyrotechnical products as possible. To wit there will be cones of rockets, candles, one shots, spinners of every type etc. with over 600 6" shells, 130 8", 45 10" and 10 12" - as well as over 500 candles. He said that as a small company they have to pay particular attention to the design of the show to be competitive as they can't hide lack of design in a big show. That said, there will be 550 salutes fired in the last 10 seconds - so the finale promises to be exciting for the salute-lovers amongst us.

I asked how it was to compete again and what they'd learned from their first participation in 2006. He said that they'd been disappointed in 2006 - due to a power failure at La Ronde, the show was around an hour late starting and this lead to the batteries in some sequencers to discharge which meant that parts of that show didn't fire and lead to black sky. Nick also said that he had learned how important a theme is in a display and that it seemed that their theme the last time hadn't been fully understood.

This time, they know the site and crew much better and also want to ensure they have an emotionally engaging show. Nick said he likes designing to film music, but is not a 'lovey dovey' kind of guy and prefers action music. There will be a range of music used - Nick went through it with us but didn't have all the film/composer details to hand. These will be posted later, as usual.

Fireworks For Africa has been pretty busy over the past year with the IPL (an Indian cricket competition that ended up being held in South Africa for various reasons) which had 59 shows in 8 cities in a 6 week period. He told of another sports-related show that had 4400 shells and 2500 one-shots fired in only 4 minutes - which would effectively make Montreal their second largest single show of the year.

Here's a picture of me and Nick with the South African flag flying in the background - South Africa is also known as the Rainbow Nation so Nick said he was being particularly careful with colour combinations for his show and he wanted me to make sure that the flag was in teh photo.



Posted: Aug 6, 2009 00:22:06

I am just back from Pyrofantasia's display, the Spanish entrant into the Quebec competition (I plan to post a review soon), and some people I talked with said that it was better than the South African show, performed by Fireworks for Africa. On the basis of what I saw tonight, I am becoming worried, especially given the level of the competition this year.

I know that the budget is obviously more important in Montreal and I remember that the South African display in 2006 was very good, so hopefully we will have a great show...

Fred


Posted: Aug 6, 2009 01:51:32

Hmmmm... and the soundtrack for saturday's show is quite similar to the one they used in Quebec last week. But you're right, budget ain't the same, and the space available either, so... we'll see.

Enjoy everyone !


Posted: Aug 7, 2009 11:35:29

Hmmmm... and the soundtrack for saturday's show is quite similar to the one they used in Quebec last week.

Four of the ten segments are from the same movies.

Fred


Posted: Aug 7, 2009 15:08:15

Actually, it doesnt really matter. Nick is reproducing (at a different scale tho) parts of show he already did in the past, just like Royal did. This way, he's comfortable with the show he will present us, as he knows those part worked well.

And who else here saw those shows ? It will be all new to us.


Posted: Aug 7, 2009 15:20:52   Edited by: fireworksforum

And who else here saw those shows ? It will be all new to us.

Exactly. There has been controversy in the past where a team has taken a complete show from one competition (in the previous year, say) and used it pretty much verbatim in Montreal, with perhaps the addition of 5 minutes. That Montreal is a 30 minute minimum is to make it hard for teams to completely reuse existing shows. But it is certainly the case that often teams re-use music and sequencing they're familiar with. I saw the script of one show and it had things like "XXXX comets" followed by "XXXX sequence" where XXXX was the name of the company. Nothing wrong with this at all! It's what makes composers and choreographers have a unique style.

Paul.
 

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