Thanks for your offer, but why is it so expensive? ©
Guys, we want it. Can you lower the price? ©
OK, but what makes this cost? ©
The thought of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 10-minute joy burns the minds of those who get quoted for a potential drone show.
The time has come to uncover the costly truth of our drone shows. What package you actually get, what extra features Hans Zimmer would invoice you for but Lumasky provides for free, and how your entire business may profit from a single show. Here are 7 keys.
1. Animation
Is it that hard to draw pictures in the sky? Hell, yes. Hard, and therefore expensive. One needs to:
Develop a show concept
To come up with a narrative fit for your specific event the team brainstorms for days. Even if you provide your reference pics, we need to tie them together into one meaningful story. A movie holds the viewers’ attention. A slide-show gets them bored. The last thing you want is your viewers yawning and looking away after 1 minute of the show, isn’t it?
Check these spellbinding 10 seconds of our show in Kuwait, where ornament flowers turned into butterflies, which then turned into airplanes. These seamless transitions took days of painstaking work and high designing skills.
Design drone formations
We never go for stock patterns or images, but customize each drone formation from scratch. First, every client’s story is unique. Second, we suppose you don’t spend that much money to see the same stock picture in a dozen of other shows.
It takes premium digital artists to make the most out of any number of drones booked for the show:
- 300 drones make them work hard on building both recognizable and enjoyable images
- 3,000 drones make them orchestrate choreography for a huge drone swarm, which complicates calculations.
Design patterned take-offs and landings
Once we thought, why wait for the magic above, when we can start captivating your audience from the moment drones lift off the ground? Our unique hypnotic take-offs and landings add an extra 4 wowing minutes to the main show. You get this signature feature from Lumasky for free.
For the most sophisticated clients we can hide an easter egg in the drone matrix. It will be seen only from above shortly before the drones take off. Idea for product launch shows: picture a secret code there, and the first one discovering it will get your product for free! After such a wow campaign your brand awareness can’t help but skyrocket.
Synchronize
Buying a drone light show you don’t get just a show detached from the surroundings. As if directing a movie, our crew meticulously synchronizes the show with a bunch of things ー temporally down to seconds, visually down to centimeters, and conceptually:
- music
- fireworks, lights, lasers, 3D mapping
- smoke or fog special effects
- artists’ live performances
- landscape and sunset, to marry the show with the setting and turn it into one big scene.
This top-notch visual technology only reaches its full potential when driven by a world-class crew. Explaining what resources it takes to deliver a captivating show will definitely clear the matter of cost for your client.
2. Equipment
At Lumasky we manufacture our own drones and the software they run on. A multi-staged production has been a tremendous investment for us, however it allows to maintain and upgrade our hardware quickly and in high-quality standards. From propellers to matrices.
What advantages does this bring to your event?
- Better visible and content-richer shows
We upgraded the drone brightness up to 3,200 lumen and speed up to 8 m/s, twice more than the industry average. Now your sky stories embrace bigger audiences at farther distances up to 5 km. And due to faster flying quadcopters, you can now include up to 15 images instead of earlier 10 without extra pay. - Easier location set up
If you plan a 300 drone show, there is no need to rent a stadium to line up this fleet for a launch. Thanks to our drones’ size, a parking lot for 15 spots will do. - Wider range of weather conditions / geography
We took care of every client’s nightmare ー a strong wind, rain, freeze, fog on a show day. Our drones are designed to fly in 10 m/s winds or at -18ºC, and save your event when other show makers would not risk operating. - Lower logistic costs
Yep, our expensive shows save your money. We had a case where transporting 1,000 Lumasky drones to country X cost the client half as much compared to other drones, just thanks to their small size and weight.
When pitching a drone show cost, highlight the above points to your client. People who handle huge budgets are always eager to know what extra value comes with the package and what risks they pay not to bear.
3. Features
Next to drone art and characteristics, we offer the unprecedented features to make your light show purely epic.
Like gaming in the sky. Can you even wrap your mind around something like this? Our insane technology suggests not just watching the show, but literally playing with drones in the air, which takes your events to unbeatable heights. If you want your event to shake the world, get ready to invest in this game-changing experience.
Another spectacular option to elevate your events is adding pyro or flash drones, or pyro planes to your sky story. Electrifying your event to make it a true fantasy night obviously costs extra.
4. Preparation
Prepping for the show is a huge and costly but unseen part of our job. Here’s what we do to run your shows in various spots of the world, and run them flawlessly.
Offline and online inspection. For some projects we travel to the destination country additionally even before the project is on. The purpose is to check the feasibility of a show in a chosen location, confirm or recommend to change the location, test the navigation, and update our tech rider if needed. We inspect online too, but satellite images can sometimes be faulty. Until a pilot physically inspects the place, the possibility of bad or very bad surprises is still there.
3D capture. Another risk-neutralizing stage. It includes 3D scanning, data processing, model integration, and other steps. We test how the animation interacts with the physical world way before the launch, and check if there is anything that could potentially screw the drone display.
Safety consulting. Our customers might not be aware of some crucial factors like flying over people, flying above traffic, etc. We consult them on every aspect to provide a trouble-free show, and avoid any reputational or other risks that may happen otherwise.
A show itself is preceded by this much checking, testing, and extra traveling. Make sure your client realizes the actual scope of prep works when considering the drone show cost.
5. Rehearsal
This is the guarantee your client gets exactly what he paid big money for.
Before the show day, we run test flights to make sure every drone is catching signals and strictly following its flight path. In case of bugs, we have a couple of days to fix them. Our pilots, technicians, and designers move mountains overnight to deliver a perfect show the next day.
6. Coordination
To keep such a mammoth project on track, we interlink and manage all the tasks hourly until the day we pack up the last drone and go home. Logistics and customs clearance of drones, logistics of the team (which sometimes crosses continents), launch site preparation. Negotiating and obtaining all the permits for an authorized drone light show is another item to be budgeted.
For our clients to be sure their event goes as intended, permits should be received on time and logistics should go smoothly both in the air and on the ground. Such intense error-free management is included in the pricing of any global drone show maker.
7. Production
As for the Lumasky drone shows, these 2 movie-like features come with the package:
- Video and photo production
We document every show and share the high quality footage with you at no charge. This specifically makes a difference when you don’t invite a videographer. If you do, we exchange our footage to double the amount of finest show materials for you.
Think of it as a long-running investment. When you buy a show, you excite your audience once. When you additionally create the crazy footage of it, it’s going to pay you dividends for a long time.Say, for event planners ー it enriches your portfolio, can be used in your content creation, and, consequently, brings you new clients asking for ‘that awesome drone show thing you once did for those other guys’. Or for end clients ー such quality footage becomes an unprecedented legacy and an ever-lasting memory of the brightest night in their lives.
- Music production
Killer fact: we write music to the shows ourselves. Remember the theme soundtrack from the movie legend “Jaws”? Every appearance of a shark was accompanied by a frightening melody that gave you chills. Seeing a shark was already creepy, but music multiplied the effect severely. Our light shows are made for the opposite emotions, but you get the idea.
Now you see what an ocean of work precedes a short but insane 10-minute show. Designers, pilots, technicians, music composers, videographers, and project managers work days and literally nights to make these pricey drones fly with pinpoint accuracy and delight your audiences.
The main point when pitching a drone light show cost to your client is this: you get much more than a premium product for a premium price.
Lumasky drone shows come with a pack of unbeatable advantages, like brighter and longer shows, interactive drone shows, movie-like animations and soundtrack, and the ability to create a lasting impact on any audience and any business with the second-to-none drone artwork.
How much does a drone show cost for your specific event? Just click here, and we’ll calculate the drone fleet and the price for your concept.
