Sydney fireworks, the return

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0:30Make your travel dollars work harder. Follow Smart Travel on your favourite podcast app. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise. That's schwab.com slash Washington Wise. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you so much for being here this morning for Sydney New Year's Eve. My name is Stephen Gilby.

1:12I'm the producer of major events. Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service, the programme that takes you inside the creative process with the artists who light up your world. I'm Regina Botros. Please welcome the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clovermore. We're expecting a million visitors around our harbour and we're expecting 425 million people around the world to be watching. Before we go any further, I want to mark the moment in which you're hearing this story. These interviews were recorded before the fatal attacks at Bondi in Sydney. Violence that shook the nation. out of respect for those who lost their lives and loved ones and for a city in mourning.

1:56This program was held back till now. Our celebrations will include the smoking ceremony on the harbour. Well, it's a hot, hot Thursday on the 4th of December and I'm standing on the fleet steps in Sydney's Royal Botanical Gardens. Right in front of me, the harbour is sparkling. The Opera House is off to the left, striking a sharp profile against the blue, blue sky. And just behind it, the Harbour Bridge. It's hard to believe that in less than a month, this whole view will explode into colour in one of the biggest shows on Earth. At midnight we'll have the world's best fireworks. They'll be launched in Sydney Harbour, from the Opera House, from barges around the harbour, from the rooftops.

2:38Again directed by Fortunato's photos. A few years ago, I followed the team behind the scenes. And now I'm back to see what's in store for 2025. Please welcome the king of fireworks, Fortunato Foti. For our family, 2025, March 29th, you have been part of the Sydney New Year's Eve fireworks. So in total, there's over 40 ,000 project effects that have been designed to soundtracks by Nookie for Calling Country and John Amar for Midnight. It's more than 9 ,000 tonnes of fireworks, It's various fireworks reflecting Australia's fauna and fauna and scoping and cracking fireworks. Fortunato Foti is the man behind the fireworks.

3:22He's been designing this spectacular event for 29 years. We're entertainers at the end of the day. If we can bring enjoyment to people for that 10, 12 minutes, well, we're doing our job. We dedicate over 10 ,000 hours to 75 staff across the museum. The bridge, the opera house, the city rooftops, for us that's our canvas, the fireworks become our paints.

3:50There are two lots of fireworks across the night, midnight but also calling country at 9pm. And this year's theme is Australian flora and fauna. So there's willow shells, there's palm trees, there's flowers, peonies, chrysanthemums. We're doing the two waterfall moments off the bridge, one from the top that'll run down the face of the bridge and then the traditional one from underneath. We've got eight water-based fireworks platforms, four in the east, four in the west, six pyrotechnic aerial drones with 144 pyrotechnic effects on each, six city rooftops, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House and Glebe Island.

4:27Let's talk about the 12 o 'clock. What is the story of the fireworks? Yeah, look, our story follows pretty much the soundtrack created by John Omar. So that's the basis of what design that I do. Similarly for Calling Country Fireworks, with a soundtrack by Nookie, more of an indigenous theme and the colours, the earthy colours. So we try and follow the track to give us the inspiration of what type of fireworks we use. Hello, hello, hello. I'm John Omar, the musical composer for the 2025 Fireworks. so what was your main source of inspiration for this night of nights oh just the ecstatic feeling of new year's eve the various memories that i have of that evening through my lifetime going way back to when i was a kid and remember watching the fireworks as a child all the way up to um partying on a boat on the harbour for the first time and yeah just that sensation of ecstasy having all of that memory how does it feel to like have the responsibility or the the joy of making something for a night that so so many people are gonna hear the responsibility has only really struck me now that i'm standing here doing a interview in front of the harbour bridge because the composition process started first you know so i delivered the music and then all the other creators have kind of worked to that timeline so it was sort of at the beginning of the year that I started writing and it's so far away from the actual moment I didn't feel the pressure or the the grandeur of it until right about now I want to start again now what was that can you cast your mind back to that first moment like where do you start in a composition what's the feeling I want people to feel at that moment or what what do I want to feel at that moment What did you want them to feel?

6:20Like, I mean, it's not just one thing. I imagine a piece of music is like a story, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's peaks and troughs, but ultimately, like, it is a sense of euphoria, and it's a release, and it's a celebration. So the music needs to do all of that, but it definitely has dynamics as well. There's moments of reflection. There's moments of intensity. There's even, I would say, relentless moments. I guess sort of tapping into some of the darker times through the year. There's a catharsis to New Year's Eve where it's like you kind of let go of everything. It's going to be pretty bombastic with thousands of fireworks just exploding in the sky.

7:01Energy and screaming and celebration. The whole event is a massive collaboration with pyrotechnics, music, video and lighting. And Ziggy Ziegler is the lighting director. We're all artists in this group. It's fantastic. The music that Jono has created is electric and paired with the DNA of plants that has come through in the Vandal animations. It's formed, and they're using the plant sort of derivative here, a chrysalis of artwork that is just sprouting out and just blossoming. And we've grabbed hold of that and we've put that into the lights and we're grabbing the pinks and the greens and pulling them out this year way above everything else.

7:46So you may have seen rainbows and deep purples and things like that in the past. This year you're going to see a lot of pink and a lot of green. There'll be some other special moments too, like the Beyond Blue moment. It's going to be a very deep blue across the harbour. Beyond Blue is partnering with the City of Sydney this year, reminding us to look after our mental health. Well, I want to know what else is waiting for us in this colour spectrum as we head towards midnight. The actual fireworks themselves are going to bring out this, sort of the essence of life that's housed within plants. Is there some kind of outstanding moment for you in the lights?

8:20There's a bit of a secret that we'll hold on to in the middle of it, but we're definitely having a giant crown this year that's not just on the east but on the western side. We are literally at about 28 ,000 lights this year, individual little pixels across the harbour, including everything in the boats and Luna Park and the bridge and on the top of the bridge, the west and the east. It's a giant painting that we're just playing with.

8:49Well, it's the second week in December and I'm with Chris Scott from Vandal. They're in charge of the videos that will be projected onto the 100 metre tall Harbour Bridge pylons. Their video focuses on Australian flora. Immediately when we landed on the botanics idea, I thought, OK, well, what if we take some plant DNA and then we allow the DNA to express itself through the visualizations of the plant. So it's a collaboration with nature as opposed to us just showing nature. So how do you get the DNA for the beginning of this masterpiece? DNA code itself is essentially made up of a series of letters, A, T, C and G.

9:32It's a combination of those four letters, different combinations times a billion. Inside that code, essentially, are the building blocks of life. It instructs an organism how to look, how to grow, how to behave. So, for example, the warata flowers was one of the species that we got the genetic code for. Now, we spoke to the Botanic Gardens of Sydney. They put us in touch with the Genomics for Australian Plants database. That is where all of the recorded, sequenced genetic code for various plants and flowers exists. And then what we do is we input that code into our artificial intelligence workflow, turns the code into spatial values.

10:17So it can influence things like time, space. In parallel to that, we worked with the Botanic Gardens and they gave us thousands upon thousands of images from their plant database of every known plant, flower, grass, lichen, fungi there is. And then what we do with those is we train our AI models on those. So, for example, with the Waratah flower, we get 100, 150 images of the Waratah flower and we feed that into our AI workflow. What that does is it trains the artificial intelligence model to basically understand what a Waratah flower is, the colors, the shapes, the forms within it. And what that means is that we can then start generating motion.

10:56We use the shape of the pylon and the architecture of the pylon to actually generate to the shape of. When we input the shape and the dimensions and all of the nuances, like the little sort of window in the middle and the step below that, and some of the nooks and architectural nuances within the pylon, once we input that, we can get the generations happening so that, for example, we can have flowers kind of cascading out of the window or growing up a specific part of the pylon. And that's really down to what generative AI allows us to do. We wouldn't be able to do that otherwise. We would, but it would be a very, very, very time-consuming job that would push us way far beyond the timeline that we have for a project like this.

11:40Well, five hours is a lot of video, and they've broken up the night into segments. Our creative segments were ground dwellers, so that is grasses, fungi, lichens, all of the plants and living organisms that you see under our feet. The second creative segment was sky seekers, so that's all about trees. obviously we're working with the pylons of the Harbour Bridge, which are these huge 100 meter tall granite monoliths. For that, we brought in the various varieties of gum trees, iron barks, you know, and that's a really beautiful sort of textural where we really sort of, you know, indulge in the texture of the bark and indulge in the texture of the surface of the tree and also look at what happens up in the canopies as well.

12:26And then the third creative segment is bloomers. So that's our flowers, basically. So firework that they're seeing up in the sky is connected to this, you know, ecosystem that exists on the bridge and then down into the ground and around the harbor. So, you know, thinking about the whole space in this sort of macro sense, you know, it's about giving nature and giving plants, you know, the stage for the night. It's about letting them take center stage and celebrating them, you know, where they surround us, they're everywhere we look. But, you know, we kind of walk around and take it for granted.

12:59This really elevates them, you know, makes them the hero of the night. So that's what it's all about.

13:08In 2022, I went out west to Foti International Fireworks, far from the harbourside to the headquarters of this family business where Fortunato designs his fireworks. We almost call it a piece of art. You have the centrepiece of the Sydney Opera Bridge and then fireworks either side of it and then add in the Sydney Opera House and the city rooftops. We always try and come up with something different and unique for each New Year's Eve. The core of the display is your standard colours, but we do a lot of pastel colours, magenta, lime, peach, orange. It's those sort of colours that bring the uniqueness of the display.

13:52We've done smiley face fireworks, we've done heart shapes, we've done stars, we've done spirals, umbrellas, palms, willow fireworks. He tells me he not only designs fireworks, but also makes them, adapting them to the buildings, platforms and structures that launch them. The aerial shells are launched out of a mortar. They can shoot anywhere from 100 metres to 300 metres in height. and obviously the burst radius of a shell will also change from up to 80 metres to 200 metres in diameter. So then we have ground-based effects such as comets or mines. Again, they're more clean burning. They don't have a lot of debris that comes down.

14:35You end up using a lot more because the effect is individual. So each individual effect has its own individual cue and when you have 185 positions on the bridge, it's 185 each time that it goes off. Again, these are all things that we've developed over the years. We've been a carbon neutral company since 2009, so we're well aware of the environmental aspects. Forty Fireworks has lit up cities in every continent and is Australia's most awarded fireworks, pyrotechnics and special effects company. It's a family-run business that started in Italy. We dated it back to around 1793. I'm, you know, seventh generation in the fireworks industry.

15:18And there's nine family members involved in the business today. So where do you start? The way I do design is I go through the music and put where I think the cue points will be for the fireworks. I'll jump around the soundtrack and it culminates to a finale at the end, which is probably 20 % of the fireworks go off just in the last 30, 40 seconds just to make it impactful. You've got people surrounding the harbour. You've got people from their apartments. You've got people going up the hill and some park. Each place has this different perspective. And then you've got the television which has...

15:53Everything? Yeah, well, yeah, with helicopters circling and capturing it. You must be considering the whole city. So you have to, one, consider the whole city. Two, you have to consider that a lot of people can't hear the music. so you have to do a design. It's still balanced and appealing to everybody. What might go wrong? Look, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, malfunctions, but we have procedures in place and the equipment to mitigate that. You have 16 computers that are shooting in excess of 17 ,000 individual fireworks queues. Worst case scenario is wind because obviously if the firework's drifting, we may decrease the size of the firework that we fire because our computer allows us to be able to isolate certain types of fireworks or we just delay 15 minutes, which is what happened, I think, last year.

16:51I think once in the last 22 years where one of the shows has been cancelled, I think it was 2003. So that's probably the only thing that would stop a show going ahead. Lightning's not always great. You're on a steel barge full of fireworks. Have you been in that sort of situation? There has been known where lightning struck a barge and fireworks started going off because obviously there's a lot of electrical current going through. Can you just run me through what will happen on the night for you? The night obviously starts off with the 9 o 'clock calling to country fireworks. From there we'll go into the midnight show.

17:28We'll have two waterfalls in that moment, which is a crowd pleaser. And that's a 12-minute show. We do 12 other jobs around Australia for New Year's, so it's not just Sydney.

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19:47You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Regina Botras and I'm following the masterminds behind Sydney's New Year's Eve as they prepare to light up Sydney's harbour and the sky for millions around the world.

20:08Well, it's the 12th of December and while most people are starting to go to Christmas parties, there are a team of creatives busy at work to make our New Year's Eve better than ever. It's wet and stormy and on a day just like this, three years ago, I spoke with Ziggy Ziegler, the maestro of the light show. It's a whole night. It's not just a firework show anymore at the end of the night bringing in the new year because it shuts down the entire city to do this. So that is never easy to organise. We light up the Harbour Bridge, the Lunapark Ferris Wheel, and this year probably about 60 marine vessels.

20:45If it was a stage, it's huge. It is the bridge coming to life in light. It's all manual labour. People carrying equipment and cables five, six kilometres worth, as well as all the lights. In what is traditionally heatwave season, basically the only thing they can take with them, you know, is a couple of secure things of water. You know, so it's long periods of hard labour over several weeks to get it up there. Let's talk about the lights in relation to the fireworks that happen. And with the fireworks, there's also music. Obviously, all of these things are informing your choices as well. Yeah, this is why New Year's Eve is so much fun.

21:26New Year's Eve is a collaboration of artists. Each artist is allowed to bring to the table some of their own art. So we will look to get colour tone and mood. So we did do, you know, if you go back to the COVID years, there was a lot of blue, you know, for frontline workers. There was a lot of respect and a lot of appreciation. then we moved into a little bit more colour last year you know a bit more warm tones and this year we're just going right out there and 60 boats describe the boats for me so there's a variety of boat vessels from ferries to tall ships to charter vessels and launchers out there and each boat captain has been given an allotment of lights which they are doing their own design for on their own boat and we are controlling what those lights do so in between the shows they're going to be doing what's called the harbour of lights parade and as soon as 9 p.m and midnight hit they are going into a specific show which matches with what we're doing on there in the other areas so they will be tied in so the harbour itself has these boats at the edge because we don't want them in the middle obviously right in the middle because it's the fireworks are there and it's not safe.

22:44We have them out the edge, which means there's a border of colour matching in with the whole show. So what's happening today for you in the process? Where are we now this second week in December? Today we are checking simulations. So we have various computer simulations, some lighting software, and we've also built our own lighting visualiser in Unreal Engine, the game engine that's used to make games like Fortnite. Because we've had two or three hundred lights in the past, big outdoor ones out there, and we added an extra 5 ,000 lights last year and were able to create a much better simulation and look at the whole show in 3D in real time.

23:21So we're in the middle of that, going through all our queues and checking them so that we have a lot less time on site. So if you go back 20 years, this show would have had people working through till sunrise every morning for a week on site. But there's very little that will stop this show. It would have to be incredibly high wind. is probably one of the very few things that would slow the show down or stop it. What's ahead for the next three weeks, is it? Three weeks. So three weeks of testing, checking, installing. There are a plethora of meetings to have with all different types of departments and people.

24:01So because we're stopping a whole city, you have to talk to the maritime units. You have to talk to the Civil Aviation Authority. You'll need to talk to the roads authorities, to the police. So there are meetings upon meetings. There's five or six nights of testing whilst everyone's asleep, not knowing that the whole harbour's lighting up in different colours while they're sleeping. I'm curious to know what happens on the night and what it feels like. In the moments leading up, the nerves come right up and you get very excited and you're double-checking everything you've already triple-checked.

24:32There are people in little boxes in the bridge, should power fail or communication fail or data fail, who instructed with little sheets on which buttons to press to keep the show going. They've got every scenario. If you're locked in there, if you've got no communication, if this has failed, if that has failed, this is your next action that you should take. No matter what, the show keeps going on. If the fireworks are going, we're going. And from that moment on, it's pure joy.

25:02December 14 changed the way this summer unfolded, A moment that sat heavily over the city as the year edged towards its end.

25:16Back in 2022. Is that your daughter? That's my niece. That's my son on the end there. The tall guy. And the one next to her is my daughter. And the other daughter is somewhere else. The rest of the crews, we basically treat them like family because we're in one of those industries where things can go wrong. It's fairly devastating, so we make sure that we look after each other and look after everybody. It's Friday the 23rd of December, two sleeps till Christmas and just over a week before the big night. It's a hot summer's morning here on the western side of the harbour at Glebe Island Shipping Terminal, where Fortunato Foti is overseeing the fireworks being loaded onto the barges.

25:59There's a lot of crane movements happening at the moment, There's a lot of bobcat movements, filling bins with sand and the equipment to stabilise them. Each day, getting the fireworks in because we bring them in on a daily basis. Loading them onto the barges and into the mortars or the tubes that we use to launch the fireworks. So they will stay here till New Year's Eve and start heading out around 3 o 'clock in the afternoon on New Year's Eve. We've got 18 containers of equipment and there's probably two 40-foot shipping containers of fireworks. So there's a fair bit that has to be put onto the barges over the next eight days.