This past Memorial Day, more than 12,000 people at Cooper’s Lake campground in Western Pennsylvania attended PyroFest 2016, where they were treated to a celebration featuring two-days of fireworks and pyrotechnical special effects. Now in its fifth year, the event is hosted by New Castle, PA-based Pyrotecnico, a still-family-owned business that has been working with fireworks since 1889. New Castle is known as the “Fireworks Capital of America,” so there’s no better place to stage this spectacular annual showcase.
Producing over 2,000 displays this past year, Pyrotecnico is one of America’s largest (and still fastest-growing) fireworks companies. Its special effects division, Pyrotecnico FX, creates amazing effects working extensively with major sports teams, film and television productions, music festivals and concert tours. Most recently, Pyrotecnico FX has toured with Selena Gomez, Halsey, Justin Timberlake, The Weeknd, Zedd and Nicki Minaj, to name a few.
In addition to fireworks and their special effects services with both stock and custom-built pyrotechnic solutions, the company also provides lasers, flames, cryogenics and fog, bubbles and snow and confetti and streamers. PLSN caught up with Pyrotecnico’s creative director, Rocco Vitale, the great-grandson of the company’s founder Constantino Vitale. Rocco’s brother, Stephen is president of the company and one of four family members that continue to work at and run the company.
PLSN: Why did your great-grandfather settle in Western, PA and how did he get his start in the fireworks business?
Rocco Vitale: My great-grandfather, who had started working with fireworks in Italy, emigrated from Italy to the United States like a lot of people did back then. He, along with many other immigrants, worked in the tin mills in the area near Pittsburgh. At that time, they were fireworks hobbyists per se at night, and that morphed into a business, which grew from there. In 1922, the Vitale Fireworks Manufacturing Company was incorporated in New Castle, and it quickly became one of America’s premier fireworks manufacturers.
Today we have multiple locations across the country; it is important to us that we have a local presence to the communities and to the clients we serve where possible. I’m based in our Dallas location. Texas is one of our biggest states and it’s important that we have a presence here, so we can keep costs down for our clients. Today, we have a company that’s made up of 85 full-time people, and those people are spread out throughout the country at all of our locations.
Talk a bit about why it was a logical step to add indoor pyro effects and other special effects to the business.
Our vision for Pyrotecnico has always been something that’s bigger than the fireworks industry. We wanted to encompass all aspects of the entertainment business. We were getting a lot of requests from our clients about the special effects and laser products that were out in the field. At our core, we are about entertaining people, and I think that we wanted to expand on the amount of people we can entertain and also diversify into different technologies. We felt like we could innovate a lot of our productions with other elements. Like last year, when we worked with The Weeknd tour. We were presented with an idea—an innovative custom concept—from designer LeRoy Bennett. He wanted custom ‘Flame Trees,’ basically vertical flame bars. It was really a cool feat, considering that it was a new and unique product that didn’t exist and we were able to see his vision through to realization.
Expanding into different markets with the special effects service was something that we made the decision to do, because we just felt that it was the right step for us. We knew we had the right people in place and wanted to take on some new opportunities that were coming our way. We’ve been doing special effects for probably the last 15 years, but five years ago, we basically diversified the company in the sense that is became a division where we put a full time staff towards it. At that point, we invested in laser technology and put a lot of our resources towards special effects equipment.
Our special effects division is made up a lot of people who come from the entertainment industry who have backgrounds in the entertainment field, whether it’s theatre, the festival world, the touring world; that’s the make-up of our effects division. Like any company in the entertainment industry, no matter the specialty, there’s a camaraderie that goes along with the entertainment business that I think we’re all addicted to, in a sense.
What is PyroFest, and how did you come up with the idea?
The whole concept behind PyroFest is that it’s a celebration of the fireworks, the pyrotechnics, and now the special effects arts. We wanted to bring an event to people that was something a little bit more; something different from what you see maybe at your community Fourth of July show.
My brother and I would visit fireworks competitions that would happen throughout the year and go see other fireworks-based events. We always had this dream to put on our own show, essentially; where we controlled creative boundaries; where we controlled everything. One night sitting around a dinner table, we decided just to do it. The first year it was a one-day event where we did all the fireworks, we did all the shows for it.
PyroFest 2016 was the fifth year, and it has now expanded to two days with other fireworks companies invited to work alongside yours. Tell us about the growth of the event.
We really wanted to bring an international fireworks competition element to it, but not actually be a competition. When we started it out five years ago, we did four shows in one day, all produced and executed by Pyrotecnico. When we decided to go ahead for a second year, we brought in another fireworks company from Spain that we have a really close relationship with, Ricasa. A gentleman named Ricardo Caballer, who’s a key player in the fireworks industry, runs it. He’s a good family friend, and we wanted to bring him into the show.
That first year, people in the audience were like, “Whoa! We’ve never seen that before.” It’s just a complete celebration of fireworks, and now, special effects as well. People who went the first year told all their friends; then more people passed the word after the second year and we just kept growing. We outgrew our original venue, and so last year we moved to Cooper’s Lake Campground. That allowed us to have a lot more space, which is always good when you’re doing fireworks displays.
With all the growth, we also turned it into a two-day festival style event. Ricasa from Spain has been with us for four years, and we have now brought in the Chinese fireworks company Vulcan as well as Sirius Pyrotechnics, a Canadian fireworks company.
Between the four of our companies, there are now 13 fireworks shows over the two days; it’s quite a scene. My brother calls it a company picnic which we just happen to invite 12,000 people to as well!
Pyrotecnico closes the festival down with the last show, and this year we brought a 24-minute show, Prism, that went beyond a traditional fireworks display. It had a big fireworks display, but we injected all of our diversity into the show. The first half used classical music and was mostly traditional fireworks. The second half added in special effects with electronic dance music as the score. We had 40 flame units, 28 lasers and 100s of strobes. The show really combined all the technologies that we offer together. People had never seen anything like it.
How does PyroFest reflect who Pyrotecnico is as a company?
It reflects our core values, which are in everything we do as a company for our clients and our audiences. It’s very important to us to be honest, innovative, respectful, safe, imaginative and passionate as a company and as people. Live entertainment, whether it be fireworks, lasers, or special effects, is about just that — entertainment. After we did a 4th of July fireworks event for a large city in the U.S., I ran into our client, who was the city’s mayor. The mayor said to me, “Man, I felt like a kid.’”For us, that was the most rewarding comment we can get back; he felt like a kid again.
For more information, go to www.pyrotecnico.com.
