Choosing a Pune venue when you want fireworks
Lawns, banquet halls, farmhouses and rooftops: what each kind of venue allows and what to ask before you sign.
How we fire a show to music
Cue sheets, a firing board and a song cut to the second: how a choreographed show is put together in our office.
A choreographed show, where each burst lands on a beat, looks effortless on the night. Most of the work happens at a desk in our Erandwane office in the week before.
It starts with the music. The family or society picks a track, and we cut it to the show length, usually four to fifteen minutes. Shreyas, who designs most of our shows, listens through and marks the moments that matter: a drum hit, a pause, the chorus, the final note. Each mark gets a time, to a tenth of a second.
Next he builds a cue sheet. Every product has a known lift time, the gap between ignition and the burst in the sky; a 3 inch shell takes about two seconds to break. So to land on a beat at 1 minute 24.0 seconds, that shell must be fired at 1 minute 22.0. The cue sheet lists each product, its position on the ground and its exact firing time.
On site, every product is wired to an electric igniter and connected to a numbered channel on a firing module. The modules link by cable to a firing board, which plays the cue list in time with the music. A technician keeps a hand on the master switch through the whole show and can stop it at once if someone walks into the safety zone or the wind turns. Before the guests arrive, we test every channel for continuity, without firing, so we know each cue will light.
