When Fortunato Foti dreams up his designs for Sydney’s dazzling New Year’s Eve fireworks display, he is drawing on more than 200 years of pyrotechnics expertise.
The Foti family moved from Italy to Australia in the 1950s, but have been in the same business since 1793.
This year, they are marking two decades as the brains behind Sydney’s world-renowned visual extravaganza, which precedes most global celebrations.
Photo: AFP
The family’s secret recipe, 51-year-old fireworks director Foti says, is passion — lots of it.
“It’s in the bloodline, we start from a young age,” adds Giovanni Foti, 29, who together with his father, Vince, are two of the eight Fotis working for the family company.
“We are so used to fireworks. We start to love them — then we start to try and make other people love them,” he says, laughing.
Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations — which take 15 months of planning and cost an estimated A$7 million (US$5 million) — are billed as Australia’s largest public event and it is hard not to see why. More than 1 million spectators pack Sydney Harbor to watch the spectacle and a further 1 billion people watch on television.
Yet much of the expertise behind the 12-minute-long star attraction — the fireworks — was not learnt through formal education, Fortunato Foti said.
“It’s been passed down from generation to generation and that’s how I learnt it, that’s how my brother learnt it, because there’s no courses that do fireworks, there’s no university,” he says. “It’s stories, recipes — it’s a bit like being a cook.”
The Fotis are involved in the entire process from designing the fireworks with a factory in China to sending the pyrotechnics soaring through the night sky on Dec. 31.
Twenty years ago when the Fotis first worked on the Sydney display, each button to trigger a sequence had to be pressed manually.
Now the entire show is operated via 16 computers, with the sequences involving 20,000 fireworks shooting from the Sydney Harbor Bridge and floating barges timed “to a hundredth of a second,” 52-year-old Tino Foti says.
“You can let your imagination do a lot more because you’ve got the flexibility ... and the computerization,” he says.
This year, the Fotis have drawn inspiration from two late musical legends — David Bowie and Prince, promising “never-seen-before” fireworks effects including purple rain.
Helping to set them off from one of seven barges on Sydney Harbor is Fortunato Foti’s daughter Elena, who jumped at the chance to join the family business when she turned 18 in 2012.
“I think not many girls can say they get to work with explosives. It’s a bit of a party-trick conversation starter, that’s for sure,” she says. “You obviously have to have a passion to be in it, otherwise we wouldn’t put ourselves through hours and hours of labor and sweat... there’s definitely high enjoyment working with fireworks.”
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