DETROIT – The 2016 Ford Fireworks are Monday and the city is getting prepared.
Patrick Brault is the choreographer for the Ford Firewords and no one knows the show better than him.
For months, he’s been designing and programming, timing the show with the music. The process is time consuming. It took nearly 100 hours to design the show, then weeks of programming the computers.
The show is all controlled by computer, sending electronic signals timed with the music. The timing is crucial.
“Don’t forget, this is fireworks, this is powder burning, so there is an inherent error margin that you can’t control,” Brault said.
The 2016 show will have 11,000 thousand shells exploding in the air. New this year is a “Ghost Shell” which you don’t see go off.
“It opens in the dark and then the color appears in a circular fashion and sweeps around,” Brault explained.
Watch the show from thousands of vantage points in downtown, or from home on Local 4 and streaming on ClickonDetroit.com.