Pyros + poop jokes =

Spent some time helping at the Wolverine magazines the last two days, also started pulling stuff for the 2011 Renn Fayre fireworks. Should hopefully have some things worth posting before too long, I know the blog has bee pretty quiet lately!

Northwest Pyrotechnics Association now accepting membership applications!

For the last few months myself and some other local PyroU guys have been working to create a few fireworks club in the Northwest to allow permitted and insured shoots several times a year. We have done a fair bit of the paperwork and are now accepting membership applications to get enough money on the bank to purchase insurance for the club. We still have a couple things to go before we get off the ground, but hopefully we'll have our first official shoot within a month or two!

I'm acting President (which still seems a bit funny to me) with Al, Chris, Harold, and another Chris also putting in a lot of effort. So visit the website and sign up so we can start lighting some fuses! NPA Website

Fireworks stores in Bangkok

My brother is traveling around Southeast Asia and sent me these pictures, so I figured I'd share them here. This is what he said about it: "I ran into some fireworks stands in Bangkok out of the blue; mortars, sparklers, rockets, candles, all sorts of things but the prices didn't seem good even by American standards."

Sumner Bridge Lighting 11-26-10

Every year the small town of Sumner, WA has a bridge lighting celebration the day after Thanksgiving to kick off the Christmas season, which includes a small fireworks show. This was the third year I worked on the show, I was also there in 2007 and 2008 (unfortunately I can't link to them as they were posted on my old blog that isn't around anymore). It is a small show, but it's fun and a quick way to get some pyro in the off season!


The show is five minutes and almost all 1.4G because of the small (and rather unique) site. We fire from two mirrored positions, one closer to the bridge where most of the crowd is, and one on the other side of the local library a few hundred feet away. The one element that wasn't mirrored was a 1.3G cake on the library side where we have a little more space. The rest of the show included quite a few 200g cakes (typically shot in multiples of three), 500g cakes shot in pairs, a few Thunder King type cakes, and a couple dozen 1.75" shells, including a few small salute shells.

Left - Taping 200g cakes together for stability and ematching in series.


Right - The position closer to the bridge. On the left are the shell racks, the cakes are inside a ring of fencing as a safety barrier.

The weather forecast said 100% chance of rain pretty much constantly, but we got lucky and only had some moderate rain on and off. With a show this size we didn't have to get going until noon and were practically done by 2:30pm, which was a nice luxury. The only issue we had was a faulty rail that showed continuity on cues that weren't even connected and was switched out for a different one.

The show was scheduled for 5pm, though we expected it to actually happen a little bit later so it would be darker. The event organizers, however, wanted to stick right to the schedule because they had a busy road closed for the show, so I was still walking back to my video position when it started. As a result, it wasn't as dark as it would ideally be and the first minute of my video is terrible because I was trying to record with one hand while at the same time getting out and putting on my eye and ear protection (I was only about half the distance from the product I wanted to be for the video).


Left - One of the positions after the show.

Other than firing before it was fully dark, the show looked great and just about everything went as it should. There were two cakes where the ematch didn't ignite the visco and a few shells that had their ematch leaders get blasted by lift from a neighboring shell, but other than those minor issues everything shot as planned. The finale looked great with some 500g cakes, a bunch of 200g and some salute cakes, as well as the 1.3G cake on my side.

With a show this size and a fairly large crew, we were done with cleanup in about an hour and a half. You certainly take a chance on the weather shooting this time of year, but there is something to be said for not having to wait until 10pm for dark!

Video: (Direct link 105MB .wmv)

What hard core pyros look like

Shooting in the rain for three hours and still smiling at the end...

St Louis Group Show

Months ago I got an invitation to design and shoot the group 1.4G show at the 2010 PyroU St Louis Shoot. For those not familiar with the event, it is an annual fireworks event organized by Pyro Universe members and sponsored by the Missouri Pyrotechnics Association. The event also raised money for P.A.W. Stoppers, which helps support police K-9 units.

[Note: This is a long post, video is posted at the bottom if you want to skip the boring stuff.]

I'll post more about the event as whole soon, but in the interest of getting this up and sent around quickly, I'll just post about the group show for now.

Anyway, I was first invited to do the show back in March as a result of previous shows I've posted on PyroU, primarily my Renn Fayre Fireworks shows. The way the show works is that fireworks wholesalers donate product to this show (that I choose from their inventory) and then I put together a show however I want for the rest of the PyroU members and the public that shows up. The group show is the final (and largest) 1.4G (all fireworks available to consumers without a license) show of the night, so being invited to do it was a big honor for me. For the last few months I pored over lists from Hales, Red Rhino, Spirit of 76, and Liberty, huge thanks to all of them for their donations! Individual PyroU members also provided a few items, so thanks to them as well! While working out product I selected music and as I had a better idea of what fireworks I had to work with I began scripting the show.

(Right - E-matching cakes, there was a lot of this to do!)

Rod from Wolverine West generously offered to provide the firing system for the show, and then offered to come with me to help out! His help was absolutely essential and the show wouldn't have happened without him. We arrived the night before the event officially started and I tried to recruit a few people at the bar where we met up to help set up the show.

We got to the site at 9am on Friday the 24th and began taking inventory of the fireworks as they arrived. I was schedule to shoot my show on Saturday, so the goal this day was to cue and ematch everything, then the next day we would just have to get it in the field and plug it in. This meant that not only did each item have to be labeled with the rail and cue numbers (I brought pre-made stickers, which greatly sped up that process), but we had to remove the fuse, punch a larger hole in the tubes, then insert and tape in an ematch (electrical igniter for non-pyros) into each item. My show consisted of 519 cues, so this was a lot of work. Further complicating things, in order to have more control over the show, around 200 of those cues were from multi-shot cakes that I broke apart into individuals tubes, so I had to take them apart and know what they did shot-for-shot to avoid mixing up my effects.

(Left - Mounting individual tubes from broken apart cakes into racks.)

I had a great crew of volunteers helping me, most of whom I had never met until that day or the night before. I'm not going to try and name everyone because I'll forget people, but everyone did a great job. We had to pack up at 7pm so that the shows for the night could start, by the end of our setup time we had every item cued and ematched except for a single case of cakes to be broken apart.

That night we had lots of great product demos, a surprise 1.3G show, and the Blind Pyro competition (sort of like Iron Chef with fireworks). I will write more about this in a separate post...

We arrived the next morning and finished up breaking cakes apart and prepping tubes, then loaded racks with shells and tubes and attached the individual tubes to open-faced racks (picture above). At this point (around noon) I went out to figure out where I would be setting up, which turned out to be my first mistake. I should have done this first thing in the morning as much of the space had already been claimed by other guys setting up their shows and when we ran our cable to the space that was available, we discovered it wasn't long enough! We got the cable issue worked out, but it cost us some time and I ended up being set back a little further than I would have liked with some large trees limiting how much horizontal space I had to one side.

(Right - Rod connects firing modules at one of the nine positions.)

Once the location issues were worked out we marked each of the nine positions and brought all the product out to the field. The setup ended up being only 250ft across rather than the originally intended 300ft because we were limited on one side by the trees and I didn't want to move too far from the crowd on the other side. In retrospect I should have expanded further to that side anyway, ideally I would have established my setup area sooner and used at least 350ft.

I temporarily lost nearly all my helpers to the fireworks raffle, but had pretty much everything in position and plugged in by around 6pm. From there we did a continuity test to confirm that every item is plugged in correctly. On any show there will be mistakes, but out of 519 cues, we only had around three bad ones, an impressive job for any show. With mistakes fixed we sat back to watch the other shows and wait until it was my turn.

After a few very nice 1.4G shows it was finally my turn. The opening went perfectly and while a couple items ran faster than I was expecting, it was going pretty well until about two and half minutes in. As the next big musical cue came, rather than four 500g cakes and ten 1.75" shells, there was only one cake and four shells! As the show went on, it became clear that items were only firing from the two far right positions and not the other seven. We were wondering what was going on and thinking that the cable connecting the modules may have been damaged because there were several small fires from earlier shows. There wasn't any point in stopping it, so we just let it run through the whole script and soundtrack with only about 20% of the fireworks there were supposed to be going off. This meant that at times there were only one or two items going when there should have been four or more, or at other times there was black sky because a different positions was supposed to be firing at that time.

I was predictably distraught seeing months of planning and two full days of setup fall apart in front of a large crowd. Luckily the 1.4G finale was all ready to go as soon as my show ended, so I figured it would be a good distraction from my own show. This year the finale was all crackle and it did the job quite well, filling the sky with so much crackle it appear to be boiling sparks. During the 1.3G shows that followed, Rod and I discussed what could have gone wrong. When the last 1.3G show was delayed due to technical errors, Rod wanted to go back out to the field and try to figure out what was wrong. After a bit of experimenting, we discovered that module 5 had failed, preventing the next 15 modules from receiving signals. Because modules 1-4 had fired and 5 wasn't working, we plugged directly into module 6 and firing a single cue as a test. When that worked we figured we were back on track, so we set the firing panel to run the rest of the script from the internal memory, meaning it had the right firing cues but it no longer had the music.

At this point I was just happy that we were going to be able to get everything in the sky, even if it wasn't all at the right time or to the music. To connect to module 6 we were about 30ft from it, so once everything started firing again we were right under much of it. From there everything ran as it was supposed to and I was happy to have debris raining on me because it meant the show was working. Being right under it on one end meant I didn't have a great view, but I could at least tell that things were going when they were supposed to. The finale, which I expected to go long because of the large number of cakes used, even ended right on cue, which was a nice surprise.

Any pyro that has worked with efire knows that sometimes things like this happen, so the PyroU audience was just glad to see we got it up eventually too and a few guys said it still looked pretty good. The general public probably just thought the first time was just a small and poorly done show and the second time was a totally different show. After it was over and we went to pick up the equipment and check for any remaining live product we found only four or five cues that failed to fire, which is lower than I expected for a show of this size. If that module hadn't failed, it would have been almost perfect!

Video

I'll save a more detailed critique of the show for later. For now, the video can be found here, thanks to PyroU member WildWilli. The first 2:28 goes as planned, then you can see a large portion of the show suddenly go dark. The rest of the music plays out with the "abbreviated" show and the mini-finale and crackle finale are worth seeing starting at 8:40. The second time around for my show starts at 10:26 and is a little more exciting, though it is shot to random music the DJ put on.

Renn Fayre Fireworks

Renn Fayre Fireworks

This post is intended as a central location to link all my Renn Fayre Fireworks show posts together to bring my google search ranking back up and make it easy for somebody to find reports, pictures, and videos of all the Renn Fayre shows I've done at Reed College.

(p.s. I know the formatting sucks, but blogger isn't very good at formatting images with text and I'm too lazy to fix it...)

Renn Fayre 2015 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2014 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2013 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2012 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2011 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2010 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2009 Fireworks

Renn Fayre 2008 Fireworks