The hardest part of the job was the setup, which took two days. We were working on a barge just near Glacier Northwest Concrete in Tacoma. Pyrotechnics work is not as glamorous as it might seem, it consisting mostly of shoveling sand, stringing squib wire, and loading mortars in tubes in the right order. I had altogether too much fun doing even this, however.
And, some photographic evidence of the fireworks show itself. Officially, I got to wear a fireman’s suite and be on “fire duty,” which was supposed to consist of running around with a fire extinguisher and putting out flames that might threaten fuses that might launch the wrong shells at the wrong time, however, because 3 other people were already doing that, I ran around with cameras instead.

Also, if you are into pictures of me, and captions, check out Dave Cramton’s pictures.

Doing work with fellow film geeks, of course we ended up making a video glorifying the 10″ fireworks shell, creating a somewhat silly loading tube ceremony. This ended up being an intro to the other footage of the fireworks show, and the aftermath, that I shot.

2008 Tacoma Fireworks from badur on Vimeo.