- July 12, 2025
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Three.
Two.
One.
Boom!
Danny Turner, the sales and operations for east Florida for Pyro Shows, is the most nervous in those last three seconds before hitting a button that sets off the thousands of fireworks lighting up the night sky every Fourth of July.
“If you are not nervous before a show, I don’t want you shooting my show just because that nervous energy makes you triple check everything and make sure you’re good to go,” Turner said. “The most stressful time in a pyrotechnician’s life on the Fourth of July is when the countdown gets to three, two, one and they have to push the button and either the show’s going to start or the show’s not.”
Pyro Shows has been the team behind Winter Garden’s Fourth of July fireworks show for at least five years, and it’s back again for this year’s show.
But getting to the moment where everything goes boom is 364 days in the making.
“When people start talking about, ‘Hey, when do y’all start working on July 4 (shows)?’ and the legitimately true answer is July 5,” Turner said with a laugh. “With next year being the 250th anniversary (of the U.S.), we’re already working on shows for next year. It’s a full yearlong process on these shows.”
The first conversation Pyro Shows has with the city of Winter Garden, or any of its clients, is what went well and what did they like or not like of the previous display and what, if any, changes could be made.
Turner said the conversation sets the tone and direction for where the fireworks company needs to go as the year progresses.
In August or September, Pyro Shows staff head to China to visit its manufacturers. There, they’ll get to see what new fireworks and effects are available that year. This leads to conversations with city staff about what they want included in the show according to the budget and what is available.
Once the New Year’s rush is over, that’s when Pyro Shows puts all its attention on the Fourth of July shows.
The design team begins crafting the show, scouring through hundreds of patriotic tunes to find the perfect pace and mixture of songs that blend seamlessly together to keep the audience captivated.
They choose what firework shapes will appear in the sky at what time. Smiley faces. Stars. Chrysanthemums. Peonies. One after the other dazzling the crowd.
The designers will choose fireworks that will match the pace and tone of the songs, adding excitement to the faster pace songs and slowing it down for the ballads.
Pyro Shows has a standard soundtrack of patriotic sounds, but sometimes clients will request other songs to add into the mix.
For the finale, the designers plan a barrage of effects with upbeat music.
“We have a digital simulation software where they go in, they can put the soundtrack in and then they can go in and lay the show over the soundtrack,” Turner said. “They can watch the show virtually before we ever do anything in the real world. That’s been a major game changer for the industry as a whole.”
In Winter Garden, there will be approximately 5,000 fireworks going off over the course of more than 30 patriotic songs.
Once the show’s design is complete, next is gathering the firework shells and equipment needed to make the show a reality. Crew members will gather the product designed for the show from the facility in Knoxville, Tennessee.
“We have a whole crew that their whole job, day in and day out, is to do nothing but take that design sheet and then they go out to all the various storage locations and pull that specific product, assign it to the show and then it goes into storage waiting to be shipped down to the show site,” Turner said.
Turner said he wishes all his fireworks displays could take place in a similar location to that of Winter Garden because “it’s a phenomenal site.”
Pyro Shows shoots off the fireworks at the dock of Lake Apopka for viewers at Newton Park to see.
“The shoot site for Winter Garden is phenomenal,” Turner said. “I would love to have that site everywhere just because you’re far enough out on the water to where it’s not a mile-and-a-half away on a barge that it looks like a postage stamp sitting out there. It’s close enough that people still get that proximity effect of man, that’s in our face. … Then you add the water, which you get the reflection off the water, and it’s hard to beat something like that.”
The only aspect of the location Turner would change is making the dock bigger so Pyro Shows can fit more equipment and gear on the dock for the show.
On top of location, Turner said the right crew needs to be in place to make the location of the display optimal.
The crew needs to be knowledgeable and experienced in knowing how to shoot fireworks off a dock in the middle of a lake and the impact the reflection of the lake can have on the show.
Turner said Winter Garden’s show is a sought after show for Pyro Shows as crew members often are requesting to be assigned to the Winter Garden show.
“The product is the product,” Turner said. “It doesn’t change. We have all the different effects and all that stuff … so it really comes down to those intangibles of the crew and communication with the folks at Winter Garden.”
Setting up the fireworks display in Winter Garden has been narrowed down to a science. In past years, it might have taken the crew two or more days to set up leading up to July 4, but now, it takes one day.
The firework shells are loaded into the firing system according to the script provided to ensure it goes off as designed.
Then it’s the waiting game.
At showtime, the crew is conducting its triple checks, making sure every shell is in place and ready to go off on command.
Exactly at 9:15 p.m. the fireworks show will begin in Winter Garden.
When the shells finally are bursting out of the firing system, the show looks different to a pyrotechnician than to an audience member. While the audience is looking to the sky, the pyrotechnicians have their eyes on the ground, making sure every shell is going off as expected.
If a shell goes up but doesn’t explode, they are watching to see where it went down to ensure everyone’s safety. If needed, Turner said a pyrotechnician can switch from automatic to manual mode on the firing system and hit various switches to signal the correct fireworks to shoot out at the right time.
When the last shell hits the sky, the roar comes from the audience screaming and applauding.
“I cannot adequately describe the adrenaline dump and dopamine rush when you hear 10,000 people screaming, meaning you did a good job,” Turner said. “That is probably one of the most addictive things in a pyrotechnician’s life, hearing that crowd at the end because we all like to shoot fireworks or we wouldn’t be doing this. After how long it took you to set up this show in the July heat, dealing with rain storms or whatever, to get that validation at the end, there’s not feeling like it for sure.”
