We didn’t join this industry. We started it.

Drone Stories came out of Studio DRIFT. In 2008, Ralph Nauta came up with the idea of a flock of birds made of light, moving through the sky as one: the idea of the drone show itself. No technology in the world could fly it yet. In 2016 Ralph and Lonneke Gordijn met Lucas van Oostrum, who set out to make it a reality, and that year the three of them founded Drone Stories: the company we built to fly it, and everything that came after. Later, Therme Art and Pace Gallery joined as founding partners.

In 2017 Franchise Freedom took off at Art Basel Miami: the first 3D drone show. The few drone shows flown before it drew flat clip art in the sky. Franchise Freedom moved in three dimensions, and it was the first drone show driven by artificial intelligence, built on the real swarming behaviour of starlings. Since then we have flown it over NASA’s rocket garden and Central Park, and used everything we learned to tell stories for Spotify, Samsung, Red Bull, Disney+, Formula 1, Coachella and Burning Man.

Pioneering means flying where nobody has flown. No drone had ever been allowed above New York City; we worked five years to change the law, and together with Mayor Eric Adams we made it happen, with the first show above Central Park. We flew the first drone show at Burning Man and returned many times. We were the first to fly drone shows in Capri, Venice, El Salvador (for the launch of bitcoin as the national currency), at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in Cannes, at EDC and Coachella, and in Hong Kong for Louis Vuitton. None of those places had seen a drone show before, and none of them was easy.

We fly under two names: Drone Stories for the shows, and Studio DRIFT, the art studio of our founders Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn, for the performances. Ideas we came up with along the way, like playing Tetris in the sky or skydiving through a Red Bull can, have since been picked up by the biggest brands in the world.

Drone Stories is the sister company of Studio DRIFT, focused on art in the sky, and many of our shows fly under the DRIFT label: 1,500 drones opening Shakira’s concert on Copacabana for 2.2 million people, and 1,000 drones over Hong Kong’s Avenue of Stars for Pharrell’s first Pre-Fall show for Louis Vuitton. The 9/11 memorial show started with us too: we came up with the idea together with Addison Mehr and made the first pitch and designs, and Addison and our partners at Sky Elements worked tirelessly to make it happen.

We are storytellers who use drones, not a drone company that does stories. That difference is the whole company.