Drone show set to light up Grey Cup Festival — hopefully

The Grey Cup game will go ahead Sunday no matter the conditions, but the weather got the better of one aspect of the Grey Cup Festival on Thursday.

A drone show is to be part of the Festival, featuring tributes to the CFL and the Grey Cup but also Indigenous peoples. Shows initially were scheduled for Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 9 p.m.

However, Thursday’s show was grounded due to cold and windy weather.

“It’s all about the battery life (in the drones),” Jeff Clarmo, the president of North Star Entertainment, said Thursday morning. “The batteries don’t like cold and they don’t like fighting the wind.

“The more they fight the wind, the more batteries we use, and if we use too much battery power in a show, then the drones start to come down and that’s not what we want to happen — and we won’t let that happen.”

(North Star Entertainment/Facebook)

Clarmo said his company has been “reinventing the wheel” for the shows in Regina. It’s keeping the drones warm and plugged in before shows.

“I think we’ve got the cold licked,” he said. “The cold is a problem, but I think we’ve come up with a strategy … We’ve done so many shows between here and the States that we were able to think outside the box to come up with a plan to beat the cold, but it’s the darn wind that’s our problem.”

He said the coldest temperature ever endured during a drone show was -8 C a few years ago in St. Moritz, Switzerland. As Clarmo put it, the company is in a “record-breaking area” in Regina.

“We talked to the (Grey Cup Festival) organizers months ago and we felt that we would be between zero and five degrees Celsius and obviously we’re at -20,” Clarmo said. “We are beyond our threshold in a normal situation for both wind and cold.”

With Thursday’s show cancelled, performances are now scheduled for Friday at 9 p.m., Saturday at 6 p.m., and Saturday at 9 p.m., weather permitting. The free shows can be seen from Confederation Park on the REAL District campus.

Clarmo said the reactions from people are “unbelievable” when the drones take flight.

Every drone has three lights with the three primary colours, which can then be blended to match any colour under the rainbow. The drones are synched and timed with a soundtrack to swoop through the sky to the music.

Clarmo said the company planned the Grey Cup Festival show for more than six months with input from the organizing committee and the Saskatchewan Roughriders, first laying out storyboards to decide what will be seen in the sky.

Although the Toronto Argonauts and Winnipeg Blue Bombers will meet in Sunday’s CFL title game, Clarmo said his company has Saskatchewan content in the show as well.

“We know the majority of the people in the stands are going to be from Regina and we know something to relate to their hometown and their heartstrings is how it will end to leave it on a really high note,” he said.

Clarmo said the drones will assemble in the sky in a pattern 400 feet wide and 400 feet high. The 300 drones are set up on a grid and take flight once the music begins, forming shapes and patterns.

Clarmo said he has been doing fireworks shows since 1990, but his company’s drone shows are wowing people across North America. He said the shows are better for people who do not like the sound or smell of fireworks.

“Everything that fireworks have from a negative point of view, drone shows have from a positive point of view,” said Clarmo.