# Developing excellent pyrotechnic formulations and effects for use in display fireworks by thinking "outside the box"

- Date: October 31, 2020
- Series: Pyro Tech Talks 2020
- Recording: available to WPA members (sign in at https://www.westernpyro.org/sign-in)

Advice, ideas, suggestions, and techniques are discussed and compared for creating effective and entertaining content for use in professional fireworks displays. This includes some do's and dont's and pitfalls to avoid. Topics include how to prevent boring your audience, how to make them laugh, how to surprise them, how to engage them, and techniques that make fireworks displays more than simple spectacle. Fireworks displays should not only be entertaining, but also should be stimulating and engender an appetite for genuinely good displays. They should utilize humor, generate emotions, puzzle and sometimes fool the audience, engage perhaps in social and or political commentary and be more than simply “pretty”.