Submitted Photo The 2023 Mum Pyrotechnics team at Lake Metigoshe are from left to right (front) Hailee Miller and Destiny Moore, and (back) Becky Eman, Jeremiah Agnes, Chaise Grondahl, Wayne Jansen, Derrick Miller, Tom Mickelson, Briana Eman and Corey Long. Photo from Derrick Miller.

SAWYER – Derrick Miller, founder of the pyrotechnics collective Mum Pyrotechnics, compared the art of making fireworks to the art of baking. Miller and the rest of his team have been busy preparing for North Dakota’s largest overall fireworks display for this coming Fourth of July.

The show is at the Nodak Speedway in Minot and is free to the public. Grandstand access opens at 10 p.m.

Much like a family bakery, Mum Pyrotechnics in Sawyer is a small group of individuals passionate about what they do. The main team consists of five members in Minot.

“We’re not even really a company. … We’re a group of people who love doing fireworks. … We don’t actually get paid. What we get in donations covers our operating costs,” Miller said. Such operating costs include supplies, fuel, electricity, insurance, software, machines and tools.

Some of the tools used in making fireworks are similar to bakery tools as well, such as blenders and mixing bowls. Baking soda is even used sometimes in combination with powdered aluminum to create a twinkling effect.

“Just like with baking bread, you can add a little bit of extras in there. You can add raisins or whatever and change the consistency a little bit. Fireworks kind of work the same way,” Miller said.

Recipes are often referenced to make effective fireworks. Mum Pyrotechnics utilizes their own recipe books and binders full of different formulas. These formulas or recipes can be altered and adjusted to produce different effects and outcomes. Simply changing one ingredient, for example, swapping out regular charcoal for oak charcoal, will make an effect to give off sparks when it didn’t before.

“Again, it comes back to baking. If you add too much milk to your cake, it’s not going to do what it’s supposed to – putting in too much flour or not enough sugar, same thing. It’s just recipes,” Miller said regarding the fireworks formulas.

Chemical reactions

Like baking, the nature of making fireworks comes down to chemical reactions between the various ingredients. Understanding these different reactions can pave the way for creativity. Mum Pyrotechnics has a chemist on site who experiments and plays with new formulas.

Colors can be added to both cakes and fireworks by adding different ingredients together. For example, barium nitrate (a toxic compound and very different from food coloring) can be added to fireworks to give it a green color.

“Some of the stuff we get into is so complex. It’s like the baking equivalent of trying to make a souffle or something where you must have the process down absolutely perfect,” Miller said.

Miller has seen stuff from the larger pyrotechnics community he has yet to discover the formula for. “A lot of things are trade secrets,” Miller said.

Miller himself will only share some of his own recipes once they’re known as belonging to Mum Pyrotechnics. Having some recipe secrecy can help during pyrotechnics competitions.

Pyrotechnicians are protective of their formulas much like bakers are protective of recipes for their prize-winning pies and souffles.

However, some fireworks formulas are much more common, such as the recipe for “black powder.” Black powder is the bread of the fireworks world. “Essentially if you’re going to bake a cake or if you’re going to bake cookies or whatever something real simple like bread is going to be a couple of ingredients,” Miller said.

Black powder, like bread, has a few simple ingredients and is the most basic recipe you’ll need for your creation. Black powder consists of potassium nitrate for providing oxygen to the fire, charcoal for the fuel and sulfur for lowering the burning temperature, making fireworks easier to light. Miller said some variation of black powder goes into almost everything they do.

Much like a novice baker making their first loaf of bread from scratch, Miller said his first attempt at making black powder in his mid 20s was, “garbage.” At the time, Miller had yet to learn any of the in-depth processes for making fireworks. He learned more from going to conventions, talking with experts, practicing and meeting professionals in person.

Team’s history

Mum Pyrotechnics started with Miller and two other friends in 2008. The “Mum” in Mum Pyrotechnics is an acronym of the founding members’ last names.

Mum Pyrotechnics’s first big break came in 2010 when the Nodak Speedway canceled its display. News of Mum Pyrotechnics doing their own small show at Miller’s property quickly spread. “We expected 200 friends and family,” Miller said. He said “and around 2,000 people showed up.”

In 2011 when the Souris River Flood happened, Mum Pyrotechnics was contacted and asked to do a display at the Souris Valley Golf Course. It was the beginning of Mum Pyrotechnics doing the Minot fireworks shows and in 2014 the group was able to go back to the Nodak Speedway for the display. Miller and his team have been building the displays bigger and bigger for Minot ever since.

Just as cakes need an oven for baking so too do large fireworks displays need digital firing systems and software modules for planning and controlling the display. The software Mum Pyrotechnics uses to simulate and choreograph shows is through Finale 3D.

This software allows Miller and his team to view the location of the show and plan out the show via 3D simulations. Miller’s daughter does all of the choreography and scripting for the show, poring well over 80 hours of work into programming for a given show. Miller and his daughter also handpick the music for the show months in advance and plan the display effects around the music. Miller said this year’s music will feature classic songs with a re-imagined twist.

For Minot’s Fourth of July show, there will be around 1,500 fireworks, consisting of at least 700 shells varying in size from 3 to 6 inches and ground effects making up the other 800 devices.

Preparing show

“Every effect going off has to go off at a certain time and it has to have an ‘address’ to it,” Miller said. The address coordinates are queued in modules in the digital firing system. The 1,500 devices for the show need 1,500 exact locations assigned to them to be tracked and programmed. The fireworks then have to be sorted according to the choreography software. The sorting is done with tags which are labeled with this information.

“It’s an obscene amount of work,” Miller said regarding pyrotechnics as a whole. Miller estimates each second of a display equals about one hour of work. “Say a show is 20 minutes long. That’s 1,200 hours of labor that went into it,” he said.

From May to June, Miller ends his work day with Ackerman-Estvold as information technology manager, then works in his pyrotechnics shop until 11 at night. On weekends, Miller works in the shop from dawn ’till midnight. The Mum Pyrotechnics team is around 10 people this time of year with about 20 volunteers needed to help set up the day of the display.

Pyrotechnics is still a hobby for Miller at its core and one of his favorite things about doing pyrotechnics is the uniqueness of it. “It’s something nobody else is really doing. It’s such a niche thing,” he said.

Miller likes being able to share his passion with the North Dakota community. He and his team also regularly attend the Pyrotechnics Guild International Convention.

During the convention Mum Pyrotechnics puts on a popular display they strive to make bigger and better each year. Miller, his daughter and his team also lead three different classes on how to build and assemble shells. The class students then create and fire off their own handbuilt creations.

Miller is more than willing to educate and mentor local pyrotechnics enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in learning how to create fireworks. He said any local enthusiast can contact him.

“I heard a quote from a documentary once saying when you get into fireworks it’s 95% work and 5% display time,” Miller said. Miller explained this ratio is only true if you’re ordering all of the product from somewhere else (not building any of it from scratch like Mum Pyrotechnics does) and only factoring in the display set-up. “When you do it on this scale, it’s more like 99.9% work and maybe 0.1% bang,” he said.