I went into this project not knowing much about drone design besides seeing the end result at music festivals and being awestruck.
Thinking I was in way over my head, I worked backwards and created the whole design identity for the holiday party before the show itself, so I could rely on my design fundamental skills. As you can see to the left, I went through some pretty rough design exploration before landing on the finalized logo for the party.
I then pinpointed the key themes and crafted the opening of the drone show around a speech our President and CTO, Ed McLaughlin, gave to kick off the drone show.
The show went through tons of rounds of story revisions and storyboarding before getting it exactly right.
Above on the left, you can see some of the initial sketches, the right is the final storyboard.
Above on the left, you can see some of the initial sketches, the right is the final storyboard.
The final storyboard can be seen to the left that takes you through the still shots of the drone images.
After the story was finalized, I worked in a sonic AI studio to create the music track completely from Artifical Intelligence by sampling existing Mastercard music in our sonic library.
The drone show company I worked with, Skyworx, then developed the animation based off of the storyboard and incorporated the sonic AI track. We went through multiple revisions and from this video ran only one practice show with 12 drones before the final show with 600 drones.
And from that video came the final show that can be seen on Mastercard's instagram & below!
The show included 600 drones, spanned 10 minutes, and was seen by over 1000+ STL employees on the ground and in Mastercard offices around the world.
