A Brilliant Start To A Spectacular Year

The words of the Mayor himself, Boris Johnson, "A brilliant start to a spectacular year", our display for London's New Year's Eve has been critically acclaimed, "The Olympic year was welcomed with a stunning display" The Telegraph, "Eleven magical minutes that dazzled the world", the Daily Mail, which also ran a full two page spread on the display with a minute by minute account of how it unfolded, unprecedented. The display was watched by an audience of some 250,000 along the embankment of the Thames, as well as 12.5 million watching live on BBC 1 and up to 4.8 million hits on YouTube.


This year was even more of a challenge than last year, we wanted to exceed expectation and try and go one better than 2011, with such a restrictive footprint of the River and London Eye to work with the key was to add a new dimension, a new firing location, the obvious choice, Big Ben or the Great Clock Tower as it is officially known. We started planning in earnest for this years event in June with a request from Boris Johnson to the speaker of the house John Bercow to ask if we could use the Clock Tower in this years display. After months of negotiations, meetings, tests and exhaustive method statements and risk assessments permission was finally granted at the beginning of December, with just over two weeks to Christmas the pressure was on to design the display and to design and build the bespoke firing rigs required to achieve the desired effect, the end results we think were worth it.


With the help of a fantastic sound track conceived by Creative Director of Jack Morton, David Zolkwer and Executive Producer Jim Donald and compiled by Radio 1 DJ Nihal, we wanted to mark this significant and momentous year of the Queens Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games with a spectacular and stunning display, using the fireworks and music to reference and celebrate these extraordinary events. The opening with Chariots Fire and the announcement from Jacques Rogge in 2005 confirming London as the host city, we opened with a bombardment of ring shells in the five colours of the Olympic rings bursting above the London Eye which exploded with the Olympic colours from the inner rim.


For the Diamond Jubilee the obvious association musically was Shirley Bassey and Diamonds are forever, we started the sequence softly with the slow tempo of the track with a bouquet of red tail comets to blinker bombettes creating 1000's of flickering stars in the sky, as the volume and tempo increased the firework choreography saw a huge barrage of our own blinker shells and white strobes literally filling the sky with diamonds.