Drones Light Up the Night at the Iowa State Fair

[Don "Wiz" Wisnieski] It's more fun than it should be. There should be a log in having this much fun.

So we brought a crew of four. Everything gets set out on a one meter grid. We get our tape measures out, find the corners. So we hook up all of our equipment and we get four drones out, and we get them about where we think they need to be, and we do a little hover test.

So the drones will go up about 3 or 4 meters, hover, and come right back down exactly where they're supposed to be.

Everything's off of GPS, but we'll probably, you know, on a typical show, we're logging on to 38 to 44 satellites in the sky. So it's all GPS. We got about a 1.5 centimeter accuracy to these drones when they're in the air. That software is what drives everything. And as long as our designer did his job right, they're going to fly right in the sky.

And then we lay the grid out from those four corners, set that all out, and there's a number of checks that have to be done. Wind wise, we can take up about 20 to 22 miles an hour wind during a show and then sit back and watch that show. Ideally, when you do multiple shows three nights in a row, you typically want to do the same show.

Now, if we were going to do it this weekend, next weekend, we might tweak that a little bit just to change the show up just a little bit. Maybe change the music track or something like that.

First thing we do is come up with a storyboard. It's their story we're going to tell in the sky, not ours. So we come up with a storyboard, and it's typically 18 to 22 scenes. Let's go 1 through 20. We put that storyboard together.

Every show is unique. We have a lot of designs that we can do a cut and paste type deal. But we really pride ourselves on customizing every single show that there is. You've got different logos up there for sponsors or this or that, and whatever is significant to the community or to the event you're going to.

Imagination is your only limitation. In order to do a drone show, we literally can put up about anything that there is.

What our thank you is, other than the paycheck, is when we hear that reaction from the crowd, the crowd goes completely nuts. That's our thank you. That means we've designed something really cool with some good animation and some cool colors and things like that.

The butter cow comes up in the sky. Believe me. And we have about, I think, 600,000 different colors we can use. We match the color of the butter cow to the tee. That's important to us is making sure that we do the right thing.