On the evening of Friday, Oct. 6, students and Fort Collins locals gathered on the West Lawn of Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center to spectate the first-ever drone light show at CSU.
The event, put on by Brightflight Drone Shows, originally began as a sponsorship opportunity for the drone air show that took place the following day at CSU’s Christman Airfield.
“(Brightflight) approached us about this sponsorship, and we went through the agreement for it to occur at CSU as a sponsorship directly towards the drone airshow,” said Christopher Robertson, director of the CSU Drone Center.
The show featured several CSU-themed animations, such as a ram’s head and an Aggie “A” on a hill, representative of the “A” at Horsetooth Reservoir. Several other animations, such as a helicopter and an airplane, were also part of the show.
“Seeing all of the CSU-themed drones that they had up there I thought was super cool, so if they did anything like that again, I’d be super down to see it,” said Calvin Masten, a first-year CSU student who spectated the light show.
Thomas Dolan, the owner of Brightflight, originally got the idea for his company by trying to find a replacement for more traditional event displays. Drone light shows like Brightflight’s provide a safer, more environmentally suitable alternative to things such as fireworks.
“I have a previous career working in insurance and risk management, so just trying to find ways to mitigate damage from events such as firework displays, and I was always kind of drawn to the drone shows being the next best thing to fireworks,” Dolan said.
To create these environmentally suitable shows with Brightflight’s current fleet of 100 drones, the total amount of time that goes into one animation is about 14 hours of work. While their shows are roughly 20 minutes long, each performance has about 12-16 animations.
“About eight hours to design, and then we run that through a physics engine and then export 100 individual paths from that animation, so that takes about another couple hours,” Dolan said. “And then we like to test the animations and fly these shows three to five times, depending on the complexity of the shows. I think the total time that goes into one animation, you’re probably looking at, I’d say, 14 hours. And that’s just one animation.”
CSU was Brightflight’s sixth show, having previously done shows for the Denver Children’s Foundation, the city of Denver and private shows such as weddings and other events.
“We’ve been around for a little less than a year, so we’re still a pretty new company,” Dolan said. “Our goal is to scale up a 100 drones every year and get to a point where we have a fleet of around 500-600 drones, and we can do the really large shows that gain a lot of attention on social media and have different fleets around the country.”
Brightflight’s next event is a holiday show 7 p.m. Nov. 4 over The Shops at Northfield in Denver.
Reach McKenna Van Voris at life@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
