Taiwan 2011

18 hours after leaving the UK, the team arrived in Taiwan to take part in the 100^th firework festival. Designed back at HQ this was the first time the team would be visiting the firing site, seeing the equipment and products that were supplied…… some fireworks were missing and had been replaced. After a couple of hours, the little amendments were made to the show to incorporate the new material.

We had 2 days to get the show complete with a crew of 15. The weather was great with temperatures around 25-30 degrees, better than the weather we had left behind in the UK! We started to load the front 9 positions, placing hundreds of roman candles and fan slices. These were going to be used for our close proximity fireworks as the crowd would be over 500m away.

As the crowd was so far away our designer decided to design the show by using a lot of aerial shells. In fact, there were over 3000 individual shells that were in the show, each and everyone had to be dug into the ground by hand!!!  

Our centrepiece and most challenging part of the display was the 400m long waterfall that had been specially made for us by our Chinese supplier, this was going from one side of the firing site to the other, all linked up and erected by all 15 crew members, what a frustrating afternoon that was!

Show night came and the nerves started to kick in, overhearing that 100,000 people were watching, and it was being filmed by TTV (equivalent to UK’s BBC) The show started with the large aerial shells, exploding with multi-break effects, unique designs and colours, everything was firing just perfect. 8 minutes in and the area lit up with the golden cascading waterfall, the noise from the crowd just erupted! It was a stunning spectacle to see and hear.

The rest of the show fired perfectly in sync leading up to our rather different finale, long-lasting horsetails exploding down to the ground whilst we had large calibre slices underneath creating a wall of golden glitter.

It was a very different show than what we normally design but we are extremely proud of what we achieved, and I think the show speaks for itself.