Dinosaurs in the sky. Astronauts looming like skyscrapers overhead. Batman in the clouds. With the advent of drones, pyrotechnics has seen advances that are simply mind-melting.
“Happy 4th of July 2023” was spelled out in drones displaying red, white, and blue in the skies over North Richland Hills.
And the pyrotechnics geniuses behind it? DFW’s own Sky Elements Drone Shows.
Fireworks once set the bar for the pyrotechnics that have long wowed American audiences—be they during Super Bowl Sunday, New Year’s Eve, or the Fourth of July. Yet, in just the last decade, the proliferation of drones has introduced the world to a new kid in town.
Once mere task robots and package deliverers for Amazon, these manually-controlled or autonomous laborers of the skies have been programmed to perform animated dances, decked out in lights. The choreographer’s imagination is basically the only limiting factor.
Having performed over 600 drone shows across the United States and beyond, Sky Elements is among the nation’s forerunners in the drone show business. Pioneers in the field, they explain how said giant astronaut waves his colossus hand; how a 700-foot bald eagle flaps its wings; how all those hundreds, even thousands, of drones fly together in perfect synchronization.
“This is a novel application of technology that currently exists,” Rick Boss, president of Sky Elements, told The Epoch Times.
Drones that were employed to survey infrastructure were originally developed to “fly a specific mission multiple times by computers rather than by hand.” These could be used to survey pipelines, scan farmers’ fields, or take magnetic readings over a lake—all following computer-controlled missions that do not deviate.
Then, Mr. Boss said, as multiple drones started flying missions, someone apparently had a thought: “‘Hey, maybe I can put lights on those and turn it into some type of art!’
“All this was happening only nine years ago.”
Of course, flying preset missions is one thing; synchronizing an army of drones together in flight would require absolute precision and accuracy, down to a centimeter.
Today’s real-time kinematics, or RTK, satellite tracking—the kind Google places in your phone and that’s used in car GPS systems—is what made that level of accuracy possible. “Google wants to be more accurate so they can track exactly where you are and sell you more stuff,” Mr. Boss said. “All that has driven the technology, and we’re taking advantage of using a novel application of that technology.”
Thus, a rift opened in the market. And where there’s an opening, someone will fill the need. Programmers created drone show software based on the foregoing infrastructure platforms, and before we knew it, we had trailblazers like Sky Elements—who ran their own fireworks company before this and still do—show up on the scene.
They started hiring 3D digital animators to put together grand productions to supplement their services. “The bulk of our animators have come from 3D games [backgrounds],” Mr. Boss said. “We simply put out a job posting.
“They animate every dot from start to finish, and then it’s output into what we call ‘paths.’”
Thus, deploying a drone armada, each programmed to fly separate missions independently, a grand, synchronized light show would unfold via something that looks quite like a 3D animation tool on a computer. During a show, individual drones are neither aware of the others nor the overarching picture.
Yet, drones have concrete limitations in the physical world—battery life, how fast their motors can move them, how deftly they can maneuver, not to mention dealing with crosswind—so things get a whole lot more complex than simple programming. “The animator has to know the physical limitations of the drone,” Mr. Boss said. They must “understand the medium of the art.”
Take that giant astronaut waving his hand, for example. The drones moving at the tips of his fingers must travel much faster than those at the elbow. The artist can only move that hand as fast as those fingertips can fly and change directions. The artist must bear in mind a set of limitations throughout.
Meanwhile, several factors in the drones—their speed, their lights, and the need to compensate for deviations caused by wind—all eat up battery life. So, each show can only go for so long. “About 15 minutes,” Mr. Boss said. “Drones can fly longer than that if we had perfect conditions and we knew exactly what the weather was going to be that night.”
Today, they’re still pushing the limits by testing flying drones faster—as much as 15 percent faster. And they also have another ace up their sleeve; Mr. Boss made us privy to an upcoming “interactive platform” where there is “audience interaction with the drone itself.”
We had to ask him what he meant by that, and what “interactive” looks like, exactly.
“That’s all you’re getting from me!” the Texan business owner said, chuckling, adding that he wouldn’t divulge what gives him an edge on the competition.
“Trade secret.”
