03 September 2023 , 19:42
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There are very few who welcome torrential rain in August, in a field, on the eve of a music festival.
Muddy revellers slamming in tent pegs aren’t keen. And nor, as it turns out, are drones. Especially the 500 - total value approx $1.5million - which lurked in one particular quagmire at the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire last week, poised to lift off.
This mesmerising grid of creatures arranged like a dot-to-dot which I tiptoed gingerly across in caked boots - a ‘swarm’ is the technical term (really!) - are accustomed to more salubrious surroundings. This is the fleet, an army of four-propeller, 700g flying machines resembling robotic spiders, responsible for magicking a giant corgi above Buckingham Palace for the late Queen’s Jubilee. (They took off from Her Majesty’s garden.) Not to mention a twisting whale and roaring lion above Windsor Castle for King Charles’ Coronation.
They are the bright lights behind increasingly sophisticated images created by the Leeds-based light show company SKYMAGIC, which have now become a soaring stalwart of our most historic occasions. But right now, firmly back on earth, it’s all a bit soggy. “I check four weather apps - I didn’t see this coming,” apologises production director James Bawn, 41.
Drones can form words and images (Getty Images)“A sand storm once stopped practice in Dubai, and there have been times we haven’t flown because of weather, but we have never been laid out ready and not taken off - this is an anomaly.” Or climate change. The Mirror was invited for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the work that goes into creating these gasp-inducing displays ahead of a new show designed especially for Wilderness.
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We’re the first to be given such access - and the extent of preparation, not to mention sheer nerves involved, is quickly apparent. This was to be the dress rehearsal, but the downpour soaked the swarm so severely, taking off risked too much damage - not to mention drones dropping like stones.
“I say they are a bit like my children,” grimaces founder and creative director Patrick O’Mahony, 41. “They go out at the start of the night with their friends and you just hope they come home at the end without any led astray!” SKYMAGIC was born after Patrick watched a video online of a very simple arrangement of a handful of synchronised drones designed by PHD students.
Our Emily with swarm (Stan Kujawa)It gave the designer, who then created stage show structures, an idea. “For me, it was always about lights, and the possibility of images,” he describes. “The sky being the biggest canvas, and the drones being pixels.” In 2015 the company was created, and testing began in a field rented from a farmer in the Yorkshire Dales.
Each battery-powered drone, with a bulbous light bulb belly, is individually programmed to fly a set course within the swarm. They don’t speak to each other. Initially, their flight path was not smooth. “We only had about 20 drones at a time and we were crashing a lot of them,” Patrick admits. “We lost 100 plus, and it was maybe costing $2,000 a drone. They were bashing into trees, everywhere.”
Now drones cost around $3,000 a piece. They partnered with a company in Singapore, and their first display was in Japan. The video now seems extraordinarily basic - a sort of dance of lit drones to music, no images. “It was 35 drones - but then, it felt like walking on the moon,” describes Patrick. The response was enormous.
A trio of mushrooms (Please credit James Bridle Photo)Now, with a team of animators on board, as well as pilots who, in pairs, programme the drones, and set their GPS so they know where to fly to and where to return home, they travel the world. Their current fleet is 2,500. Their biggest show in the Middle East used 2,000. For many of us, New Year’s Eve 2020 was our first glimpse. Three hundred drones created images including the Twitter bird and Captain Tom Moore.
“Images are more complex now, drones move faster,” reflects Patrick. “It’s about 20m a second now, then it was 12m. Now we would have Captain Tom walking across the sky.” His favourite image remains the Jubilee corgi. He drew the initial illustration. ‘Does it look like a bear?’ is scribbled beside it. (Ears were changed.)
From sketches, designs are rendered in a digital form and drones are allocated to realise them. Then animators build them using 3D software. The team does around six hours flying practice. They prefer to do it in situ, although the top secret national displays have been practised on the Dales’ farm. “The lambs do try and nibble,” James admits.
The team prepares to give the drones a test flight (Stan Kujawa)For Wilderness the aim is to practise mid-week before festival-goers arrive. When we arrive the team has already sent the drones hovering in safe batches of 100. They sit charging, green battery lights blinking, under canvas. But as the sun dips, the painstaking work begins of carrying them outside and laying them across a plastic TOLZ - Taking Off and Landing Zone.
They blink in the dusk as the pilots, Soon Chiew, 40, and Hamkah Hassan, 28, sit at a trestle table in head torches before laptops. Then the business begins of ‘turning them on’ individually. The drones squeak like aliens calling to each other as they flash greens, blues and reds. It’s all a bit eerie.
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“Patrick will give the command ‘arm the drones’,” Soon explains. “Then we turn on the propellers, you can feel the breeze. Then comes the command ‘drones to hover’ and they lift up, about 50m. The buzz sounds like a swarm of bees, or a loud vacuum cleaner,” he smiles. “And then comes the command ‘5,4,3,2,1’, and they go.”
Butterfly during the Coronation Concert (Getty Images)What does he press? “Enter,” he laughs, pointing to his laptop. Patrick adds: “They rise up in batches and form a cube in layers a bit like a Shreddie, before they move to the display area. The most terrifying thing is always the first wait for them to light up,” he explains. “You know everything is moving but it’s dark, you are waiting for the first image.”
As the excitement builds I ready myself to watch the drones lift in a horizontal curtain, to hear the swarm buzz… And then it rains. The sodden drones are scurried inside in the hope they’ll dry out in time to try again tomorrow. If Civil Aviation Authority permission can be obtained. This time it will be in frustratingly careful batches of 100, the rest off grid in case damaged kamikaze machines plunge from the sky (a few do).
After all this, I wonder, can SKYMAGIC make the magic happen? Of course they do. Saturday night brings a spectacular hot air balloon, peacock, frog, and stag to the night sky. "We are still only in the infancy of drones,” insists Patrick. “Now, we have 500 a metre apart, but imagine them 10cm apart? By the time of William’s coronation we might be able to make a portrait of the king!” But they’ll only ever be one corgi.