The fireworks exploded over Cinderella Castle as the designer responsible for their beauty watched, feeling goosebumps even though she had seen this show time and time again.
For more than a year, 30-year-old fireworks designer Tess Santore Bland choreographed the display on her computer. Now, on a chilly November night, she could see her designs unfiltered.
All around her, thousands of Magic Kingdom visitors tilted their heads up to the sky and pulled out their cell phones to capture the first new holiday fireworks display at Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party since 2005.
“I love to watch it with people who haven’t seen it before,” Bland said.
Bland listened.
How would they react?
Would they catch any of the Easter Eggs she threw in, like the five golden rings blasting in the sky in sync with the lyrics from The Twelve Days of Christmas? Would they see the outline of a green Christmas tree that appeared for an instant?
The applause rang out, as the booms erupted in the sky. The music paused.
Bland smiled at the fake finale.
The show was only three-quarters of the way done.
Growing up in New Jersey, Bland always knew her career would be spent in fireworks – an industry that’s historically been dominated by men, said Julie Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.
But that’s changing, Heckman said.
“I think there has been an underlying protection of the women in the family businesses knowing this work is dangerous, but we are seeing over the past decade more and more women have bigger design in the shows, the set-up and the execution,” Heckman said.
Bland comes from a large Italian family where pyrotechnics is the natural profession. And celebrating relatives’ birthdays at home meant, of course, fireworks.
“It’s in our blood,” she said,
After migrating to the United States, her great-grandfather started his own fireworks business in New Jersey in 1890.
Now, the next generations of family members operate Garden State Fireworks, which manufactures pyrotechnics for Walt Disney World and other places. The company is known for its Fourth of July spectacular over the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and other popular events including Major League Soccer All-Star Games, the aerial display in Super Bowl XLVIII, and the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, according to the company’s website. The family declined to be interviewed for this story.
In college, Bland studied chemistry to better understand the science behind the beauty and how the chemical reactions could produce such dazzling colors. She graduated in 2011 from Salve Regina University, a private school in Rhode Island.
Employed at Disney for the past eight years, Bland is the primary fireworks technician for all special event shows at Disney, having worked on the fireworks at the Invictus Games in 2016 and the “Star Wars: A Galactic Spectacular” at Hollywood Studios.
Replacing the holiday fireworks at Mickey’s Christmas Party became a two-year endeavor for the company.
It meant developing a new musical score and, for the first time during Mickey’s Christmas Party, broadcasting digital holiday projections onto Cinderella Castle so it looked enwrapped in a tacky Christmas sweater or covered with snowflakes.
“There’s really no limit to what you can do with projection,” said Dana Carlson, a Disney video producer who led a team of animators and artists to create the projections on the castle. “That was really exciting for us to just be able to think outside the box and come up with things that we’ve never even seen before.”
And Bland’s fireworks had to fit in with the rest of the show. She worked closely with Carlson and others to collaborate.
Bland looked at computer renderings that captured the fireworks and the castle projections to the one-hundredth of a second.
“We’re not able to go out night after night and do a full fireworks show in the middle of the night,” said Kate Pappas, a managing producer at Disney. “Much of their work is all done by computer generation now, which is something we did not have many years ago.”
The first – and only – full dress rehearsal at the Magic Kingdom happened a few weeks before Mickey’s Christmas Party. It was early in the morning on Oct. 24, before the theme park opened, that Bland could see how her fireworks show looked in real life.
“Minnie’s Wonderful Christmastime Fireworks Show” debuted Nov. 8 to the public at the special-ticket party, which runs on select nights through Dec. 22.
At Disney, the fan base pays attention. There is chatter when Disney does something new, and when something is phased out.
Blogger Denise Preskitt, who runs MouseSteps.com, said she was eager for the holiday fireworks show to get an update.
She left impressed by Bland’s work.
The fireworks, Preskitt said, “are fantastic.”
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