Those stunning Inauguration Day fireworks behind Katy Perry? Thank a Chicago-founded company that ‘wanted it big’
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The smash ending to a smash day in Washington, D.C. Wednesday was Katy Perry singing “Firework” as, appropriately enough, fireworks went off around the Washington Monument behind her. Many, many fireworks.
That display, a stunning four minutes or so, was created by Strictly FX, a company founded in Chicago in 1996 that does most of its pyrotechnics business with touring rock shows and events like the Super Bowl. And it served as the finale to the “Celebrating America” prime-time television special devoted to President Joseph Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Inauguration Day.
The internet exploded afterward, mostly congratulating Perry for her performance. The fireworks were credited mostly as backdrop. That’s fine with Adam Biscow and FX; Biscow is the designer that created the show, the guy who put the white burst directly behind Perry’s outstretched hand just as she hit her final chorus and elicited a breathless “Oh yeah!” from host Tom Hanks as he signed off the show.
Speaking with the Tribune from the Washington Mall on Thursday, he said shows like yesterday’s are a team effort. Strictly FX, which moved its headquarters to Nashville in 2018 but maintains an office in Mount Prospect as well as California, created the show, with the shells fired by Garden State Fireworks of New Jersey, which holds the contract to do fireworks in the city and is a frequent collaborator.
“We don’t do shows like this for the credit,” Biscow said. “We do it for the love of what we do, it’s little piece of history we got to take part in.”
Strictly FX also did the show for Biden’s victory speech in Wilmington, Del., in November that got attention for its use of drones, and Biscow said the president-elect came in and thanked the crew personally afterwards.
Biscow declined to give a dollar figure for the cost of Wednesday’s show, but allowed that it used about 20,000 shells fired from two separate launch areas, one a chain of nine zones behind the monument itself, the other in West Potomac Park. The sky filled behind the Washington Monument was about 2,000 feet wide, carefully choreographed to the song. At moments the sky was a riot of dripping silver — those streaming explosions are called brocade shells and are a favorite of his — and at others a wall of brilliant red, with the edges of the bursts just touching each other.
Two reasons for the two launch zones, he said: One was for a variety of camera angles and the other was grass. Specifically, the carefully maintained grass on the Washington Mall that the National Parks Service was very protective of. He couldn’t drive on it and had to build a deck for his launchers. The size of a firework burst in the sky depends on the diameter of its shell, and he could only fire up to 4-inch shells around the monument. Bigger shells of up to 10 inches were fired from Potomac Park.
Asked to describe the aesthetic he was going for, “I wanted it big,” he said. The Washington Monument was the iconic visual centerpiece so he wanted color to surround it. The cold weather helped, he said, it makes the colors brighter. No drones this time, because of security precautions.
A crew of about 26 staffed the show, which used firing computers and a time code broadcast back and forth between the two sites. They started setting up Jan. 15, and first started planning the show (hired by program producers RK Productions of New York) right after the election. The time code was choreographed to the song — if you noticed, the fireworks didn’t begin until Perry was through her first verse, said Chris Santore, part of the family that runs Garden State Fireworks.
“Me, I’m a fireworks guy so I would have shot them at the start of the song,” he said, ”But they said no, we want to hold and let Perry start the track.” Her lyrics reached “ignite the light” and the fireworks began with a bright, white strobe effect. The firing computer takes into account the size of the shell and how long each takes to reach altitude and explode — the 4-inch strobe shell needed about four seconds between launch and burst.
It was a fantastic show, was the assessment of Melrose Pyrotechnics designer Matt Peterson. His Indiana-based company does most of the big Fourth of July fireworks displays around the Chicago area, including at Navy Pier, as well as pyrotechnics for the Bears and other major sporting events. “They nailed it.”
His company is capable of doing shows of similar scale, but they’re rare in the United States. Melrose Pyrotechnics has done shows internationally, including a show in Korea that was larger.
“In fact, funny story,” he said. When Barack Obama won the presidential election in Nov. 2008, he was on a barge in Lake Michigan. He and his crew were contracted to do a big fireworks display that would have filed the lakefront sky after Obama finished his speech in Grant Park. It was temperate night for a Chicago November, “but it was on the lake, it was chilly,” he said.
In the limousine on the way to Grant Park, Obama called his staff. Scratch the fireworks. The staff called Peterson on his barge. “I said, can you repeat that?” Obama had decided the optics of an exuberant celebration wasn’t quite right. Melrose Pyrotechnics still got paid, but it was the presidential display that got away.
Back in D.C. on the National Mall, Biscow and his crew said they needed to get back to work to take advantage of the afternoon daylight. They were vacuuming the grass. “Fireworks are a mess.”
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