Balloon Fiesta.

The brief was a $1,200 pilot fee plus a daily rate. We’d leave at 4:30 AM to be on location by 5, then shoot at night inside a field of roughly 500 other drones — all 7-inch, flying in formation, lighting up and shifting from one shape to the next. My job was to fly through it. The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

The airspace is tightly held — a TFR overhead, other pilots working their own vicinities, a fixed envelope I was cleared to fly inside. My drone carried a light so it stayed visible after dark. I’d pass straight through the show drones; theirs would cut their lights as I came through, and at night, lights off, they simply vanish.

So we built a system. We took Verge Aero’s 3D show plan and mapped the timing — how many seconds I had to make a move between one image and the next, when the lights dropped, when they came back as a new shape, and where I needed to be when they did. A show runs 15 to 25 minutes. Between halves we’d land in the dark — a friend lighting the pad — swap a battery with the camera still rolling, and be back up in about 60 seconds. Three days straight: a 5 AM show and a 6 PM show, both flown at night. High consequence the whole way — clip one drone and that drone can take out another.

The safety protocol came out of a near-miss. On the first test evening, before the full rules were set, 20 or 30 people were standing right under the formation. With ~500 drones up, a battery that runs low and doesn’t descend in time starts to drift — and one drifted into me. I was close to the landing zone, goggles on, sitting down, no way to move; my partner ended up holding a chair over my head. We sat down with the team after that: anyone underneath needs cover, hi-vis, helmets, operators on comms. That’s the standard now, and it was earned that night.

What lives on this page is the selected shots from that shoot — chosen inside the Verge Aero client edit, not solo authorship. The client was stoked on the footage.