An exclusive premiere with the UK’s top young composer

As the UK’s most creative fireworks company we were thrilled to team up this month with the UK’s most talented young composer for an exclusive premiere of his latest composition.

Tom Player has worked with such music giants as Hans Zimmer and is rapidly making a name for himself in the field of games and movie music.

His latest album Close Your Eyes is due for release in Spring 2019 and we were privileged to be given access to one of the tracks for our latest display. The occasion was Event Buyers’ Live!, the event industry’s leading convention which took place at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire.

Choreographing fireworks to music is something at which we excel and for this epic display, lasting just 2 minutes 30 seconds, our head of design Rino Sampieri used nearly 700 individual ignition points.

Here Rino explains how he designed such a brilliantly choreographed display.

Creative use of varied dynamic effects

As a seasoned designer of firework displays choreographed to classical and popular music it was an exciting opportunity to be asked to design to new music that had never previously been performed in public – a true first. This challenge inspired an approach not to only be innovative but also an opportunity to use many of our existing effects in novel ways.

I was particularly pleased with the arc of the composition which allowed the creative use of varied dynamic effects at low, medium and high levels and allowed me to deploy colour in sequences so readily suggested by Tom Player’s composition.

For those interested in some of the technical details, the design called for 42 launch positions with 670 individual cues over two minutes and thirty seconds. The display included some new effects such as our Golden Horsetail to Blue Tip shells. These have a dark gold, almost copper colour, as it hangs in the sky and changes to a blue tip just as it fades out.

Launched at high level with my signature horizontal shooting three colour change mine below (our new red to blue to green effect) the match to the music seemed perfect. Of course, the whole design and preparation process took two weeks and a small army of pyrotechnicians one day to set up the display across a 100m site.