DELIVERY OUTDOOR
How to make a real ‘banging tune’
Fireworks experts Titanium are increasingly combining pyrotechnics with music
BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN W
hen it comes to generating a big bang you’d be hard pressed to find any fireworks
companies with a larger payload than Titanium. Te company is well used to creating stunning displays - and an awful lot of noise - for some of Scotland’s most iconic events including Edinburgh’s annual Hog- manay show, the Forth Road Bridge 50th anniversary celebrations and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014. But as well as just the pure,
explosive joy of detonating huge quantities of gunpowder, the firm is increasingly combining its love of pyrotechnics with music. If you’ve attended any an outdoor classi- cal musical concerts recently, you might well recognise this, such is the popularity of using fireworks to accompany pieces for their exciting crescendos. Director Toby Alloway, as well as
being the man with his hands on the plunger (by plunger, we mean a sophisticated suite of networked computerised firing software) is these days just as likely to be seen reading musical score sheets. “If you’re doing a show with a live orchestra then you need to have a dedicated score reader, so in my case I’m the score reader as well as the firer, so it’s a far more intensive process, it’s almost like you’re play- ing an instrument.”
Luckily, Alloway is a trained
pianist, so is just as well-versed in crotchets and quavers as he is in the correct quotients of explosive mate- rials, a skill that serves him well as he times the rising chorus with the trajectory of multiple projectiles. “I don’t play particularly often but
I use my musical knowledge in all the displays that I design and fire. Whenever we do that sort of display we ask the orchestra to supply the score they will be playing and we get that annotated and marked up showing exactly where each sequence needs to fire. Tat way you
Titanium can choreograph fireworks with live music events to an
accuracy level of one hundredth of a second
can ensure that the display is as ac- curate and as close to a full com- puter-fired display as possible. We will annotate the score to account for the lift time, as it’s called, that’s the time that it takes for when the firework is fired into the sky to the moment that it bursts. It is quite a complex process; displays with a live orchestra are a totally different level to doing them with a pre-recorded soundtrack but it’s a fantastic thrill.” As well as being a thrill, it’s also
an intriguing blend of art and sci- ence that requires an unnerving degree of precision.
34 | EVENTSBASE | SUMMER 2016
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