First off, here's the video. It's a castle siege with fireworks, so it's not too out of place for ENWorld. Hope you enjoy it!
And now some background -- My wife and I got bored and decided to make a fireworks display for the 4th of July. Rather than just buy some fireworks and light them off in the driveway (like most people do around here) we decided to do something more interesting. So we built a castle under siege out of popsicle sticks and filled it with all the rather tame legal fireworks you can get around here (Utah
). We had a central tower with a spiraling staircase lined with sparklers, matches and jumping jacks. Firework fountains built into the walls for watch towers. I even built some automatic catapults that would launch crackling bombs into the castle when the fuses burned down. And we chained everything together with linked sparklers so everything would go off in sequence after lighting just one thing. It was all very impressive and we had lots of friends, family and people from down the street come out to watch it.
This is not that video.
We don't actually have a video of that castle due to a few too many presses of the record button on the camera by the person running it.
We do however have the last few seconds of it burning down when the camera-person thought they stopped the recording, but in fact they were just then turning it on! Needless to say, that video is not very interesting. But, you didn't miss much. A 'lightning flash' firework fell off right at the beginning, set the castle on fire and the whole thing went up in a spectacular blaze of failure! A chaotic (though impressive) mess of fire, crackling explosions, flying sparks and smoke! Fun to watch but hardly what we had planned.
So we decided to do it all again for Utah's next "legal to light fireworks" holiday- Pioneer Day on July 24th! This time we'd learn from our mistakes and make sure it went off as planned. And maybe we'd get a little more elaborate and ambitious with our castle siege. Oh, and we decided to ditch the lame local fireworks and go right for the good stuff across the state line.
This time
we ran the video so it went off right. My wife put it together with some music into this awesome (IMNSHO) video and we posted it on YouTube. And then we entered in the "Best Backyard Fireworks Display" contest by
Phantom Fireworks. I'm not sure how we'll do in the contest, but hopefully creativity counts.
Anyway, please check it out and rate/comment if you have a youtube account. Thanks!
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