How many drones does a drone show need?

100 drones: a room, a courtyard, a close audience

Indoors or in a small space, 100 drones are a lot. Social Sacrifice, the first indoor drone performance, flew 100 drones in the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. At that distance every drone reads as a single point of light and the audience sees the detail of the choreography. Shapes and text are limited; movement and atmosphere are not.

200 drones: weddings, birthdays, launches

200 drones is where storytelling starts. It is enough for a figure, a name, a date, a simple animation, and it fits a private audience of 150 to a few thousand. We flew 200 for a wedding, for a birthday in Montenegro with 150 guests, for the Van Gogh Museum's 50th anniversary and for Samsung's foldable phone launch. Franchise Freedom, the performance that started it all, flies with 200 to 600.

400 drones: a city square, a brand moment

With 400 drones the picture gets sharper and the show can be seen from further away. Franchise Freedom at Art Basel Miami flew 400 for 15,000 people on the beach; the Formula 1 Las Vegas launch flew 400 over the Strip.

600 drones: festivals and city celebrations

600 is our most common number for a crowd of tens of thousands. It gives legible logos, text, characters and transitions at the distance of a festival field. EDC Las Vegas (150,000+ people), ACL Festival, Amsterdam's New Year's Eve, Spotify at ADE, Tesla's Cyber Rodeo and LUMA Arles all flew 600.

1,000 drones: a skyline

At 1,000 drones the show becomes part of the city. Central Park, Burning Man (80,000 people in the desert), Mercedes-AMG F1 in Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Grand Prix flew 1,000. The canvas is wide enough for a full narrative with several scenes, and the show is visible from kilometres away. Cannes flew 1,400 over the bay.

1,500 and more: one show for a whole city

For two million people on Copacabana beach, 1,500 drones opened Shakira's concert. For Desert Swarm at Noor Riyadh, 3,000 drones moved as one swarm over the desert. At this scale the question is no longer how many drones, but how much airspace and how many take-off fields the site allows.

So how many do you need?

Start from the audience, not the number. Up to a few hundred guests who stand close: 100–200. A brand event or a square with a few thousand people: 200–400. A festival or a city crowd of tens of thousands: 600–1,000. A beach or a skyline with hundreds of thousands: 1,000 and up. The number of drones is also the first factor in what a drone show costs, together with show length, location and animation. Tell us the site, the date and the audience and we come back within a day with the number we would fly, and why.