The final entrant in this year’s Benson and Hedges International Pyrotechnics competition brought the series to a dramatic finish.
The show lasted forty minutes, compared to the rest of the entrants’ 30. This show was unusual in that there were intervals where a spoken poetic commentary was read out with the music – the theme of the show being the sun, moon and earth.
This show was also unusual in that extensive use was made of rockets. For example, the show opened with a tight group of perhaps 50 rockets thrusting into the sky and giving the effect of a “growing” plant.
One very unusual effect was produced by a large willow star shell which broke quite softly but contained a large (probably magnesium) parachute flare. This was, I think, intended to give the impression of the moon talking to the earth. Another unusual shell was again based on willow stars which burned through to bright stars. Nothing unusual in that except in this case, all the stars in the top hemisphere of the burst transformed to white quite quickly, whereas all the bottom stars fell quite a large distance before they transformed to white. I presume the shell must have been somehow balanced so that its orientation was correct when it burst.
A lot of use was made of “active” stars: stars which propel themselves through the sky at a greater velocity than that from the shell break. As mentioned earlier, a lot of rockets were used in the display, some of which were very large judging by the breaks they produced and the noise of their thrust.
Throughout the display, the quality of the colors used was excellent, especially blues and purples.
A few shells appeared to burst either in their guns or extremely low and one or two burst at a slightly greater altitude but low enough that their stars ended up in the river. All the failures appeared to be from the same area of the launch site.
The finale was breathtaking with an enormous amount of shells being fired in the finale two minutes with a tremendous number of salutes, the display ending with a barrage of very large salutes. The crowd, the largest of the year in my opinion, roared their approval. This was an excellent display.