“At Wolverine Fireworks, I design the choreography of our shows, including The Bay City Fireworks Festival. There are a lot of things that go into deciding what goes into a show.
Apart from the budget, the size of the site for the show determines the maximum shell size, and the size of the crowd determines how big the show needs to go. In the case of Bay City’s festival, where you’ve got people spread out 360 degrees for miles, you want to get big shells that go high in the air so everybody can see them.
On the creative side, learning what different fireworks do is key. Picking songs is almost a show in itself: a song should have a lot of highs and lows, then you tend to stagger songs fast and slow to build the show up and bring it back down. Obviously, a lot of songs are going to suggest the word ‘red’ or ‘blue’ and you try to hit those moments. Other than that, it's about matching the sound of the music and the speed of the fireworks.
To actually create the show, we use software called Finale 3D. As you program the show, you can watch it go off in 360-degrees, which is important in Bay City because people are watching it from all different angles and it’s important to us to give everyone the best show we can. o as you're shooting it, you can have drone footage going around the show. It really gives you the idea of what that show will look like to scale on your site.
From a technical level, the finale gets less technical because the focus is on firing a lot of shells. Generally, a total shell count in Bay City is 8,000 shells, and about 2,000 of them are in that last minute during the finale.
Once the design of the show is complete, the crew uses the information to label the fireworks appropriately according to the script. Then they pack it up, we ship them out to the site of the show, hook them up to the firing system, and it’s go time!”
—John Compau, Production Manager, Wolverine Fireworks
Watch Wolverine Fireworks at work this week at The Bay City Fireworks Festival!
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