Behind the scenes of a fireworks show (1 Viewer)

[mike cummings]

Every December the City of Manhattan Beach has a Christmas street party that concludes with with a fireworks show that we shoot off the pier. A group of friends of mine (mostly fellow Disney pyrotechnicians) have been working on this show for several years and have a blast doing it. For this past year's show, we positioned a camera at the end of the pier aimed at the guns for an upclose and personal look at the view that we on the pyro crew see. The small window inset into the lower left hand part of the screen is from a camera that was in the audience aimed at the pier.

I had to break it up into 2 parts because Youtube doesnt let you post videos over 10 minutes:

YouTube - Manhattan Beach Christmas Fireworks show 2008 Part 1
Shortly after the show started, we had a data cable fail which caused alot of shells not to fire. This explains the dark sky in the first part of the show. We finally got the cable swapped out about 8 minutes into the show and it finished off well


YouTube - Manhattan Beach Christmas Fireworks show 2008 part2
The finale for the show starts about 7 minutes into this clip. It is pretty spectacular from this camera view. When the show ended, we realized we had alot of unfired shells from the earlier data cable failure. We reset the firing computers (we were using 2 computers) and manually fired these shells in what became an "encore" (about 8:05 into the clip). The mayor loved the show and commented on how well the "encore" was received by the crowd. We didn't tell him is was us covering up for a previous failure.

This last clip is a time lapsed video taken all day as we set up and loaded the guns for the show.
YouTube - Manhattan Beach Christmas Fireworks pier setup

 

[d'kid]

Enjoyed the heck outta that Pyro... set-up time lapsed was great, great choice of music... and made it much easier to visualize 6:45 thru 8:00 on show vid #2.
glad I watched Vid 1 and 2 before I read all the way thru

Thank You

d'kid

 

[mick]

thanks mike,
time lapse is really cool.

 

[Rollout96]

Very cool Mike. I liked the time lapse too (made me tired) ;-)