It is one of the most understandable questions we get about our stock drone shows: “Can we just change the music?”
Before answering it, there is an important distinction to make. This applies specifically to our stock drone shows, which are complete, pre-designed productions where the soundtrack, animation and choreography have already been created together. If you are commissioning a bespoke drone show, the music is part of the creative process and can absolutely be chosen or developed with you.
If you are not familiar with the difference, we explain it in more detail in What Is a Stock Drone Show?.
For a stock show, though, the short answer is no, and slightly counter-intuitively, that is a good thing. A properly designed drone show is not a collection of pictures in the sky with a song playing underneath. The soundtrack, animation, movement, lighting, transitions and pacing should all have been designed together.
Music is part of the show. If you change it without changing everything else, you haven’t simply given the same show a different soundtrack. You have taken one component out of a finished production and replaced it with something the rest of the production was never designed around.
The Music Is Part of the Animation
Watch a well-produced drone show closely and you will see that synchronisation goes much further than making something flash on a beat. A formation might resolve as a musical phrase finishes, movement might accelerate through a build, or a transition might begin while the music is still developing before arriving at the next image exactly as the soundtrack changes.
Colour, intensity and movement can follow changes in instrumentation, while a large visual reveal might deliberately be held back until the music gives it somewhere to land. Just as importantly, the ending of the animation should arrive at the same time as the ending of the music.
None of that happens by accident. The soundtrack effectively becomes part of the timeline on which the entire show is built.
Try Changing the Music
We have created a simple demonstration. In the video below, you are watching two different drone shows at the same time, both playing against exactly the same soundtrack.
The top animation comes from the show that was actually designed around this piece of music. The bottom is the ending of a completely different show, which was originally created around another soundtrack.
There is an important point worth acknowledging when you watch it: some moments in both versions still appear to line up with the music. That is completely normal, and it doesn’t mean that both animations work with the soundtrack.
Hitting a Beat Isn't the Same as Choreography
Music naturally contains beats, bars, repeated patterns, builds and changes in energy. Drone animation also contains movement, lighting changes, transitions and reveals, so if you put two unrelated pieces of timed material together for long enough, occasionally things will happen at roughly the same moment.
A colour change might accidentally land on a beat. A formation might start moving just as the music begins to build. For a few seconds, an animation designed around completely different music might even look surprisingly convincing.
That is not the same as choreography.
What matters is not whether an individual movement happens to hit an individual beat. It is whether the structure of the show follows the structure of the music. A properly choreographed production works across musical phrases, transitions, builds, pauses and ultimately the whole journey from the opening to the finale.
Watch What Happens to the Structure
Look again at the comparison and, rather than watching for individual beats, look at where each animation is trying to go.
The show designed around the soundtrack develops with it. Transitions have somewhere to lead, visual moments arrive when the music gives them significance, and the animation and soundtrack gradually progress towards the same destination.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the other animation. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is simply doing it against the wrong piece of music, and that becomes particularly obvious as the two shows approach their endings.
A properly choreographed show needs its visual finale and musical finale to agree with one another. The music cannot still be building when the drones have finished, and the drones cannot be halfway through another sequence when the soundtrack reaches its final note.
You could, of course, simply fade the music out whenever the animation finishes, but that creates another problem. There are few quicker ways to make a polished production feel unfinished than fading a track out halfway through a chorus simply because the drones have run out of animation.
The beginning, middle and end of the music need to belong to the beginning, middle and end of the show.
Imagine Doing It Anywhere Else
We would find this approach strange in almost any other form of entertainment.
Imagine a ballet that has been meticulously choreographed to Tchaikovsky. Keep every movement exactly the same, but on the night replace the orchestra with an unrelated rock song. Inevitably, there would still be occasional moments when a dancer landed on a drum beat, but nobody would take that as evidence that the replacement soundtrack worked. The choreography was created around the phrasing, dynamics, tempo and structure of something else.
The same is true of film. Replace a film score without changing the edit and some cuts will accidentally fall in sensible places, but the emotional builds, moments of tension and releases will no longer be where the music expects them to be. You could do exactly the same experiment with a professionally choreographed fireworks display. The fireworks would still be impressive, but if you changed the soundtrack without reprogramming the firing cues, you would have fundamentally changed the production.
A drone show is no different.
A Drone Show Should Be a Show
This distinction is particularly important to us because FlightShows comes from a theatre and live production background. We think about drone shows as shows, rather than simply a succession of shapes appearing in the sky.
That means thinking about rhythm, pacing, anticipation and release. There needs to be a reason one scene follows another, and the transitions matter just as much as the individual pictures. When music forms part of the performance, the soundtrack and the visuals should feel as though they belong together.
That thinking influences everything from the initial storyboard through to animation, lighting, transitions and the final performance. It is also the reason our stock shows have fixed soundtracks.
“Choose Any Music You Like” Isn't Necessarily a Benefit
At first glance, being told that you can choose any song for a pre-designed drone show sounds like greater flexibility, and understandably that can appear to be a benefit.
There is, however, another question worth asking: if the same animation can be placed underneath almost any piece of music without being changed, how closely was it choreographed to the original music in the first place?
There is a genuine difference between music accompanying a drone display and a drone show that has been designed to music. Both involve drones flying while a soundtrack is playing, but they are not necessarily the same creative product.
For us, allowing somebody to replace the soundtrack while leaving all of the existing animation untouched would not be an upgrade. In most cases it would make the finished show worse. We would rather offer less apparent flexibility and deliver the production the animation was actually designed to be, which results in a better drone show.
Why Stock Shows Have Fixed Soundtracks
One of the reasons a stock drone show can cost considerably less than a bespoke production is that much of the creative work has already been completed. The concept has been developed, the soundtrack selected and edited, the show storyboarded, the formations animated, the transitions designed and the lighting programmed.
The pacing has also been refined around the soundtrack, including something as fundamental as making sure the musical and visual endings arrive together. Those elements collectively make up the finished show, and that completed creative work is the product you are buying.
Changing the soundtrack therefore isn’t like changing a song on a playlist. To do it properly, we would need to go back into the production and adjust the animation, timing, transitions and potentially the structure of the show itself.
At that point, you are no longer simply making a small change to a stock product. You are beginning to commission bespoke creative work.
What If a Particular Song Is Important to Us?
If there is a particular piece of music that matters to your event, a bespoke drone show may be the better option.
Music forms a huge part of the creative process for almost all of our bespoke productions. Sometimes a client comes to us knowing exactly which song they want to use. Sometimes they have several ideas, and sometimes they simply know the feeling they want to create and want our help developing a soundtrack that will achieve it.
Once the music has been agreed, we can build the animation around it. Visual ideas can follow musical phrases, transitions can respond to changes in the arrangement, and important images can be revealed at exactly the right moment. The show can build when the music builds, breathe when the music needs space, and reach its finale when the soundtrack reaches its own conclusion.
There are exceptions. Some marketing activations, filming projects and other primarily visual applications may have little or no need for musical choreography. Where music forms part of the audience experience, though, we regard it as part of the production rather than something added afterwards.
So Why Can't You Change the Music?
Because the music isn’t simply sitting behind the show. It is part of the show.
Our stock shows are finished productions in which soundtrack, animation, lighting, movement, pacing and transitions have been designed to work together. Another piece of music may occasionally hit some of the same beats and, for a few seconds, it might even appear to work perfectly well.
But look beyond individual beats. Watch the phrasing, the transitions and the builds, and most importantly watch how the show reaches its finale. That is where the difference between coincidence and choreography becomes clear.
We don’t put music behind drone formations. We make shows.
