Team combines technology, artistic style with 600 dancing points of light
A team from Arizona State University animated the sky with 600 lighted drones in a spectacular show before more than 53,000 people at Mountain America Stadium on Saturday night.
The four- to five-minute drone show during halftime of the ASU football game was designed by three students and a professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
The drones danced in a space above the scoreboard that was as big as a 30-story building, swirling and zipping around to create a series of three-dimensional animations, including a drum, the ASU logo, a spinning pitchfork, Sparky and a gigantic football helmet. The drone colors were synched to the Sun Devil Marching Band, whose members wore glowing LED bracelets that emitted radio signals.
The show was the culmination of nearly three months of work by Ana Herruzo, an associate professor in The Design School and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, who recruited Henry Beach, in his third year of a Master of Fine Arts program in theatre (interdisciplinary digital media), and Alba Olivé Martí and Derrek Sekito, both fourth-year animation majors in the School of Art.
Beach, who was the project manager and production director, said he was thrilled with how the show turned out after endless hours spent in front of a computer screen in the design phase.
“The crowd's reaction was amazing — to hear them cheer when the drones would transition to a new scene,” he said.
“But mostly the scale of the drone show was just so beyond anything we expected. We spent weeks building out our show in pre-visualization so that we could wrap our heads around what the design of the show would look like in reality, but it's just so hard to depict the volume it actually takes up in air space over the stadium.”
The show was set to the marching band's performance of the music of Elton John, marking the 50th anniversary of the release of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”
The project was done in partnership with Nova Sky Stories, a drone company founded by Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon Musk, and was funded by a donation from the Swette family, longtime donors to ASU.
Tricky technical details
Herruzo’s background is in large-scale, interactive audiovisual shows — “anything that interacts with people at a large scale,” she said.
She teaches immersive experience design and leads the MEDIAted eXperiences Lab in the Media and Immersive eXperience Center in Mesa.
She was first approached about the project in June, ensuring a short timeline for such a big project. Herruzo said the goal was to follow the donor’s wishes to “electrify the marching band.”
Then she began collaborating with Nova Sky Stories, which was founded by Kimbal Musk in June 2022. He was inspired to found the company in 2021, during the pandemic-impacted Burning Man gathering in the Nevada desert, when the iconic burning of the large wooden man figure was instead a drone show.
Musk said that a friend suggested collaborating with ASU because of the high quality and cutting-edge educational practices of The Design School.
"I have always been interested in supporting and exploring the intersection of art, technology and education, and this idea quickly appeared to be a fantastic fit,” he said.
Herruzo hired her student workers in August, and they began working on the design, which had several constraints. Because the drones are not allowed to fly above people, there was a strict “bounding box” space above the scoreboard. The drones took off from the practice field next to the stadium.
“This design is specific to these 600 (drone) points, and there are very tricky technical details they had to learn and they did such a good job,” she said.