How the night skies will light up on Hogmanay
Calling a fireworks display company on 4 November about an event next year was probably not the smartest move – when you are launching a magazine the days tend to be a bit of a blur.
But Toby Alloway, a director of Titanium Fireworks, exudes the calm of someone whose responsibility is to safely detonate four tonnes of explosives in front of a large crowd. He and his colleagues would complete 46 shows in a fortnight, including one for 75,000 people in Tower Hamlets, in London. After 5 November, they would be busy preparing for a display at Wembley Stadium, part of an ‘Olympic-style’ reception for the Indian Prime Minister.
The company’s directors have more than 50 years combined experience in delivering hundreds of displays, including the closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Since 2013, they have delivered both the London New Year’s Eve celebrations and Edinburgh’s Hogmanay. Last year, after founding Titanium, their own company, there was the Glasgow Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. This year, there was the Rugby World Cup opening and closing ceremonies (and key matches in between).
As well as these highlights, Titanium is also busy delivering displays for villages, towns and cities, for companies and local authorities, for weddings and birthday parties. All born of a passion for fireworks which, in Alloway’s case, began with his parents entrusting him as a youngster with the family’s bonfire night display. Even for such an early enthusiast, he probably did not envisage what he would be doing in 2012: “Sitting at a desk in the middle of the Olympic Park waiting to fire four tonnes of fireworks across a mile of the river leading up to the stadium was an incredible experience. The assault on the senses was something I will never forget.”
But each display has its own reward: “Every time you watch a show that you’ve designed and see it come to life exactly as you envisaged is such an incredible feeling.” For Edinburgh’s Hogmanay 2016, work began in October when organiser Unique Events discussed with them the soundtrack selected for the display. Titanium spends around 70 hours choreographing the display using a software and hardware system called FireOne, known as “the Photoshop of the fireworks world”. Another piece of software, ShowSim, simulates the display on screen in 3D; useful for broadcasters in deciding on camera positions.
Through late November and early December, the team spends around 480 hours preparing the fireworks, sourced from China, Europe and the UK and named after flowers – such as Peony, Chrysanthemum, Willow and Dahlia – for the shapes they create on exploding. They are on site from 27 December; a crew of 14 pyrotechnicians will walk in the region of 17 miles between the positions at Edinburgh Castle, West Princes Street Gardens and on Calton Hill to prepare the shows.
There are more than 2,200 cues delivering nearly 11,000 shots into the sky with an incalculable number of stars in 18 different shades of colour. The display lasts five minutes, but if each effect was fired individually it would last more than four hours. What takes weeks to design and prepare is cleared with help of Historic Scotland’s staff in just under three hours so that unwitting visitors to Edinburgh Castle on 1 January would have no idea what had happened at midnight on the 31 December.
Related
