After setting the fireworks up on spare land close to Marcel’s villa, I asked him if he would like to shoot the show himself, using one of our wireless remote firing systems… big grins all round!! I do believe we have a closet pyro-freak in the making here!!!

Marcel had a great time pressing the remote buttons to shoot his fireworks, and I hope it will give him yet another excellent memory of his Birthday Firework Display!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARCEL !!!

Marcel at the helm!

Off we go! lol

An awfull 'out of focus' photo (all my fault sadly!) of Marcel's birthday-bash friends!

We were vivited by our old friends (old as in we have known them for a while – as opposed to them being old!) Christian and Melanie from Wupperthal, Germany a week ago. It was so good to see them again, particularly as both of them are firework ‘experts’ in their own right. They run their own firework shop in Wupperthal, so we spent a lot of time swapping stories, and me picking their brains for any information that could help us improve our service and standards of safety. Christian mentioned the cost of remote firing systems in Europe (very expensive), so I put him in touch with a Chinese contact of ours that actually manufacture many of the sytems available in Europe… at around 50% of the cost if bought from them direct! I showed Christian and Melanie some of the systems we use, and their faces lit up… I hope they work out for you guys!

I will upload some pictures soon, as well as a link to their website. I do hope that next time (soon?) we will be able to spend more time together… it is so cool talking to fellow ‘pyro-nuts’, and I am proud to call Chris and Mel our Pyro- brother and sister!

There can be nothing better than the approval of your peers, and when Chris and Mel saw how we set-up and shoot, and the level of safety we bring to all aspects of our work they gave us the ‘thumbs-up’! For our standards of safety and service to be acceptable by our peers – judging us under European standards – then I can feel proud about our work. Thank you to you both… and I hope we meet again very soon. Have a safe trip home guys!!!

Christian & Melanie enjoying Laarn's cooking at our home.

Despite our best efforts to limit ourselves to only a handful of shoots this New Year’s Eve, we have ended-up with 8… not being able to turn down those who didn’t realise that they had left booking us way too late!
Putting our foot down at 8 shoots didn’t quite work either, as we are also ‘assisting’ a further 4 shoots (2 more resorts and 2 private parties) by lending them each a wireless remote firing system so that they can shoot their own fireworks (bought from us of course!) safely – and have fun pressing buttons of course! We will be setting the 4 shoots up for the customers, and getting everything ready for them so that all they have to do is switch on the remotes and get ready to start shooting at midnight!

Last week ‘Blue Team’ shot a wonderful display for the opening of a resort in Lamai… they made me really proud! (Aaaaw! lol). It was a ‘Big Do’, with some rather important guests – including a good friend of ours, the Chief of Police of Samui – so we were determined to give the owner – Boris – a really special event!
The firework display was to be set to music – Boris’ choice, which – although great for fireworks – consisted of 2 songs, each well over 5 minutes long! The actual display was going to be around 4 mins 30 secs in total, so I had to cut down the music to suit (I use a great free software programme called Audacity). It took quite a few hours of playing around and cutting the music, but I eventually managed to get in down to a total of 4 mins 30 secs. Now all we had to do was choreograph the fireworks!

I must admit that I do like choreographing firework shows… it brings out my artistic side lol… !!!
We also made Boris a very special Lancework set-piece, consisting of a damn-near perfect representation of the resort’s logo and name… it looked great!

BUT… I am a firm believer that ‘self-praise is no recommendation’, and therefore I am never really relaxed or happy until after the firework display, when we can judge the success of our hard work and efforts by the reactions of both our client and his opening ceremony guests. We may believe we are wonderful at what we do, but if our client isn’t 100% delighted with our efforts, then we have – I believe – failed them.

Fortunately that has never been the case – we have no place for arrogance or self-importance – as we always put the needs of our customers first.

Thankfully, Boris was more than delighted with the choreographed firework display, telling us that his guests all agreed that the show ‘was fantastic’! Ok… NOW I’m happy!

The sequencers performed very well during the show, and showed their worth during a particularly frenetic bit of the music, which would have been difficult (impossible) to keep up with (fireworks-wise) by manually pressing buttons! Great bit of kit those sequencers, and we may well be investing in a few more over the coming months.

I will try and get some video of our New Year’s machinations up on the site, but, untill then, keep smiling, and enjoy the pyromaniacs main night of the year… New Year’s Eve…. YEEEEE-HAAAAA!!!

This wireless remote firing system is capable of utilizing 10 'slave' units (four of which are shown), with each 'slave' capable of firing more than 100 fireworks... meaning that this system can fire more than 1,000 fireworks from up to 10 different places, at the same time! (Rather more than '24' eh? lol)

Another example of a wireless remote firing system we sometimes use... with the control desk having the ability to shoot 10 different 'sets' of firing units, each 'set' consisting of 12 cues, and each cue capable of firing up to 5 fireworks (still with me? lol). This means that each of these systems can fire up to 600 fireworks each!

These are the small hand-held wireless systems that we rent to customers wanting to shoot their own fireworks. Each system can fire up to 24 fireworks (as used by the contributer below). They are great little 'hobbyist' systems for amateurs to use, and are therefore easy to operate... as 'Mr.R' (who commented below) will surely know

For info. that might be of interest to other ‘pyro-nuts’ (like myself!) out there in web-land, we also use numerous 10 cue sequencers along-side the wireless remotes… each sequencer being fully-programmable!

Just so you know! lol lol Have a great day!