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.
As the project and production manager, Beach juggled many responsibilities — everything from dealing with the company that provided the LED wristbands to making sure there was a tent with food for the drone pilots the day of the show. He coordinated with the stadium facilities team, the marching band and Nova Sky Stories. And he worked with Olivé Martí and Sekito to create a software tool to visualize the animated show.
“There are a lot of design constraints when working on a drone show in terms of how they have to model the animation and account for things like making sure the drones don’t collide with each other in the air,” said Beach, who is a research assistant in the MEDIAted eXperiences Lab.
“So when modeling and working on these designs, they did a great job of adapting their own style to the limitations of the medium.”
After designing the show, the team’s models were uploaded to Nova Sky Stories, which programmed its small, lightweight drones.
Olivé Martí is on the Sun Devil water polo team.
“It was very interesting to me to bring art and sports together, so that was really exciting,” she said.
“At the beginning, me and Derrek were doing storyboards when we realized the limits. At one of the meetings, I was really happy with one of my models, and everyone said, ‘That’s not going to work.’ So OK, I had to completely change it.
“When you’re working on it, you feel like 600 points will not be enough.”
Sekito said he had never done anything like this but was excited to learn the process and the tools.
“We had a specific bounding box we had to animate in because the drones are not allowed to fly over people, and we had to keep the power lines in mind,” he said.
“It was a challenge at first. There were a lot of different parts and everything was always changing, so we had to stay flexible in our design.”
Herruzo said that the faculty in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering are hybrids of technology and design.
“And the students who graduate from here have those skills,” she said.
