Have you ever looked up at the night sky and seen a dazzling display of synchronized drones creating art in mid-air?
I stumbled upon this awe-inspiring technology close up while walking in my neighborhood park. Two really nice guys on site from the drone video company indulged my curiosity as I edged up to the ‘do not cross yellow tape’ put up by the Pixis Drone company to take some photos. What I thought was going to be an epic video of a test run of hovering drones on my iPhone, turned out to be an epic video of… ‘my foot’. Don’t ya hate that?
But that didn’t stop me from diving into the world of drone light shows! Thanks to my recent guest Bernard Ozarowski, President of Pixis Drones we all get to learn a little more about this new ‘in demand’ entertainment art form.
Bernard’s journey into the drone world is as fascinating as the shows themselves. “I was a white-collar criminal defense lawyer for 13 years,” Bernard shared. “But when I saw an NBA logo made out of drones at Liberty State Park, I knew this was something that could bring joy and magic to people, including myself. Now, I get to do work that makes me feel like a kid again.”
Pixis Drones collaborates with major brands like Warner Bros., McDonald’s, and even the NFL to create jaw-dropping aerial displays. From shaping logos to telling entire stories in the sky, the process begins with detailed storyboarding and animation, which eventually transforms into precise drone flight paths. “Each drone is programmed with a path file that tells it where to go, what color to display, and when to return safely,” Bernard explained.
As for the technology itself? Bernard broke it down simply: “Think of each drone as a pixel in a moving image. Our software calculates how every drone needs to move and light up to create a seamless visual. It’s like choreographing a dance, but with hundreds of performers in the sky.”
The possibilities are endless, whether for halftime shows, weddings, or product launches. And while smaller shows start at $40,000, premium productions can climb into six figures. Despite the cost, the safety protocols are what truly impressed me. “Our drones are surrounded by geofences that act like an invisible safety net,” Bernard said, “and we’re always prepared with a second pilot monitoring every flight.”
It’s hard not to admire Bernard’s passion. His team is composed of people from wildly different backgrounds—lawyers, special forces, and marketing experts—all united by their love for pushing creative boundaries. “I even get cool dad points,” Bernard joked, recounting how he recently put Minecraft in the sky for his son.
Drone light shows aren’t just the future of entertainment—they’re a testament to the magic of technology and human creativity. Thank you, Bernard, for sharing this inspiring glimpse into Pixis Drones. I’m officially a new fan and can’t wait to catch their next dazzling display.
Meanwhile learn more about the behind the scenes magic of synchronized drone light shows in the fascinating podcast of my live conversation with President Bernard Ozarowski on The Debbie Nigro Show.
If you’d rather read than listen the transcript of the audio is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show!
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The Legend of the Phoenix ends with beginnings. with drone art in the sky and drone-like shows.
Hey everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro. I’m going to introduce you to a guy I’ve been trying to get on the show for a while, who’s the president of the company called Pixis Drones.
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And the reason is, I was walking in a park near my house, right, about a month and a
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half ago, and I see this setup going on in the middle of the field of which I had no clue what it was. So I go over, I see some guys, you know, there’s always guys, right? And I’m like, hey, guys, and they’re like, I really can’t tell you anything. I’m like, come on, come on, come on. I want to I love this.
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I want to do a story. What is this? So these two nice guys, Chris and Matt, were there. They’re aerial photographers for this company. And I was able to, I thought, take a video of what I was looking at, which was all these drones all lined up, rising, hovering in sync, being tested in the middle of this field.
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And then I went back and looked at the video that I thought was so exciting it was video of my foot. I was like really Debbie? So instead of wasting more time on me, let me introduce you to the guy who makes a lot of this happen with a team of really talented people. His name is Bernard and I’m hoping I’m saying your name right Bernard.
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Is it Ozorowski? Ozorowski?
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Ozorowski. That’s exactly right. Thank you so much for having me.
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Bernard, we’re together finally.
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It’s taken a minute, but I’m glad to be here.
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So Bernard, this is magic what you guys are doing. And this Pixis drone company that you’re running is in demand from some of the biggest names I’ve seen in the entertainment industry. I know Paris Hilton, name came up with a Make-A-Wish Foundation event over the Santa Monica Pier. I see Warner Brothers.
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I see McDonald’s, I see I see all these really really big names, casinos and college teams. Is everybody
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calling you to do drone shows? It does seem like it’s really it’s really picked up. It seems like as folks are getting to see it or getting to experience it and are able to share it with their friends, with their family, that the demand has really hit that sort of that hockey stick place you dream of where we’re super busy these days and working with a lot of really fun clients.
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You are a drone pilot. Did you get that license in advance of this industry blowing up or did you have to get that license to catch up with what the demand was?
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So I have a very strange background. I was actually in white-collar criminal and regulatory defense for about 13 years the founder of the founder of our company the other owner He invited me out to a show and I knew he did something with drugs. I didn’t know what it was I didn’t really I hadn’t had any experience at the technology before. And all of a sudden, I’m standing there, actually in Liberty State Park in Jersey City,
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looking at the NBA logo formed by drones in front of the Statue of Liberty. And for me, it was this eureka moment of what a better life it could be to do something that makes me feel like a kid again, like this does, as opposed to what I’d been doing
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with my day-to-day. So it was really, for me, the power of these experiences, I’m proof of it, because I have a very different life than I used to.
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Oh my God, you sound happy. You sound really happy. What I think is really interesting about these drones, A, is that they exist, and B, that somebody could orchestrate lining them up as I saw in a giant display on the ground first, which it has to happen, right? And then somehow manipulating and almost like a maestro making them all rise to create words or whatever you’re doing, pictures in the sky in different colors. How is that done?
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It’s actually, it’s deceptively simple because the drones are actually unaware of anything that’s around them. Each drone receives what’s called a path file, which tells it where to go in the air, where it’s supposed to stop, what colors it’s supposed to turn, and how it’s supposed to safely return home. And we input those files into each and every drone at each and every show for how they
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fly. Now, the flip of it, we’re flying hundreds, if not thousands of lawnmowers in the sky. So we have to be very mindful of safety and the design of the shows as we pilot them. Each of our shows has two pilots,
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a primary pilot who is essentially responsible for takeoff and landing, and what we call a red button pilot, or the second pilot, who is responsible for safety while the show is in the air, because we have the ability to catch individual drones
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and stop them, or pause or land the show if ever there was an emergency situation.
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Wow, that’s intense.
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When it all starts out and you’re planning this, like say for Warner Brothers, okay, and you’re going to make their logo in the sky, does that get done on computer first?
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It’s a pretty involved process creatively where it begins with a lot of back and forth with a potential client about what the design of the show is going to look like, what they’re trying to tell from a storytelling angle. And then we work through sort of a storyboard rendition, we create still mocks of the proposed images, which are then built out into an animation. And then the last step is finalizing the actual flight paths of how the drones will fly in the sky.
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Is there a height that they have to get to or does that differ at every location?
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It differs by location. We want to ensure that we have the best possible sight lines for where a show is located. From an FAA perspective, we’re able to fly 400 feet above the ground in pretty much anywhere in the United States in what would be called Class G airspace. And with an additional waiver, we’re able to fly higher, which is important say if we’re gonna fly at a stadium
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or something like that where we need to get clearance so that folks who are inside of the bowl are able to see the show.
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So when I happened to see my first glimpse of a drone show being laid out to be tested, you said it wasn’t actually a show, what was I looking at over at the park when I was like ooh, ooh, ooh?
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So what you saw was part of was a testing. You saw what’s called a hover test. So as part of our, our setup during the day, we’ll bring the drones up in, in waves of, depending on the size of the show, roughly a quarter of the fleet at a time. We bring them about three meters in the air to ensure that they’re properly connected to satellites, that all their calibration is synced and that we won’t.
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It’s essentially so that we know we won’t have any safety issues when the show itself flies.
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Okay, cool.
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Yeah, when they were hovering, I was like out of body excited. I had my video on. I’m like, I just caught hovering. People aren’t going to believe this. And then of course, it was my foot. I hate that.
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I really hated that. Anyway, the team that you have around you have very unique backgrounds, right?
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There’s a lot of people who came maybe from marketing, advertising, they’re storytellers,
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strategists. And they’re all very different.
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And they’re all very different.
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And they’re all very different.
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have very unique backgrounds, right? There’s a lot of people who came maybe from marketing, advertising,
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they’re storytellers, strategists.
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How many people does it take to put on a drone show for like Netflix or NASCAR? It depends on the size of the show, but our core team for each show would be a pilot, a co-pilot, someone on the client service side, the person who actually builds the grid where the drones are placed, which is actually a very important part of the puzzle
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to receive the files properly, to fly the way that they’re supposed to, as well as a driver. And then we kind of plus up based on the number of drones with contract day labor for the unpacking and boxing and things like that of the drones themselves.
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Yeah, it’s a lot of work. So brands do this, right? People have new products they want to launch. People have company events, could be using your services. The agencies out there who have clients, right?
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We’re trying to figure out how to do the next great thing for their clients, people who are event planners from the Super Bowl and the NBA draft. Have you done those things, Super Bowl and NBA draft?
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We’ve actually done both of those things. We’re actually playing the first drone show for Sunday Night Football this weekend up in Buffalo for the Bills, which should be a very cool experience.
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Oh my goodness, that’s really great. Is it going to be right at the stadium?
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It is. We’re actually flying it the night before for content capture for NBC to put into their sort of game presentation package, and then we’ll be flying it again at halftime during the game for the fans.
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Oh my gosh. What do these drone shows cost? I think there’s a range where somebody actually who didn’t have a bazillion dollars could could hire you guys to do a drone show and then of course there’s the unlimited budgets. Is there a range of what the shows cost you could share?
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Or a smaller show something that’s probably appropriate for a you know a wedding something like that is in the forty to fifty thousand range but premium shows are you know you’re looking at low six figures for the sort of thing you’ll show like what we do for the Giants or the Eagles or you know organizations like that. Wow what does a
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drone cost the kind of drones that you guys use like what is it to buy one?
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It’s a special piece of technology it’s a single-purpose drone so it doesn’t have you know what you expect if you go buy a drone at Best Buy they don’t have cameras they you can’t control them you can’t just put it out in your backyard and lift it off in the air. There’s a whole bunch of programming stuff that needs to happen for them. But each individual drone costs about $2,000.
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Okay.
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I just can’t get over what you guys can do. This is just the most fascinating thing. Do you ever get tired of waking up and going to do this every day since you were, since your law days?
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Oh, absolutely not.
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I mean, this, this, I get to do something, probably the most remarkable part of it is I get to do something that my kids think is cool. We got to put Minecraft in the sky earlier this year, which is my son’s absolute favorite thing. So I get cool dad points whenever we work with one of these very fun brands.
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Oh my gosh, you are a really cool dad, man. So you live where, Bernard? Are you in New Jersey?
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I’m in New Jersey. I’m just outside of Princeton.
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Okay, and you travel, you have to travel a lot, I imagine you’re on the road.
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I’m on the road a lot, our team is on the road a lot. I tend to go to a lot of our premium activations for largely for business development purposes, but I’m also a pilot, so I could be tagged in or cover co-pilot when necessary.
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Wow, how do you charge these drones? Like, what energy are they running on? So we have
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special built batteries that are designed to work with these drones. We actually have a whole way that we charge them to be as environmentally protective as possible with how we both dump the power out the drones when they’re stored and how we recharge them to make sure that we’re keeping as green a footprint
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as possible. Wow, I’m asking like really interesting questions because I’m really interested. As far as insurance goes, you just mentioned briefly that somebody’s got to be on watch to make sure nothing goes wrong because these things are like small lawnmowers in the sky. Can somebody really get hurt if these things fall out of the sky? I imagine they can and who is insuring the drone industry these days? I’m sure that was a new category.
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So we’re cut, we actually, we have sort of a, you know, your basic general liability, all that type of stuff. We additionally carry a rather significant aviation policy. So it’s the same general type of insurance that you would get if you were flying a small airplane or something along those lines. And to your point about safety, it’s one of the most important things that we think about
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as we’re designing a show and as we’re selecting a location. Essentially, we need to build out a safety perimeter outside of the actual area where the show is flying. So if ever a drone were to go astray, they’re constrained by geofences, which they can’t fly outside of, which are kind of like an invisible safety net in the sky. And if ever a drone were to hit that, it’s basically programmed to drop. It can’t fly outside of the geofences. So we build our safety perimeters with basic trigonometry the highest height the drone goes the fastest it flies to
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ensure there’s never a situation where a drone could come into contact with a
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person. That’s good to know and that’s fascinating. Is this an industry that somebody might aspire to enter and if so how do they get educated to become you
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know a member of the drone flying community? You know what’s funny is we have people with radically different backgrounds who are part of our team. One of our directors of flight operations, he was actually a lawyer overseas before moving to the States.
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We have, you know, we have a former special forces guy who’s our chief pilot. We’ve got marketers. People come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but what’s been interesting to see from my seat in all of this
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is the growth of sort of kids who are interested in getting into the industry. I get messages on LinkedIn from 22-year-olds who, for them, have known this for years, say, through their entire college experience, and are now looking to get into it to chase sort of the artistic ambitions of what this can be, as opposed to just sort of the technical or just finding a job side of the ledger.
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Oh man, very exciting time in technology and really nice of you to take the time. Thank you so much for the education about Pixis drones and the drone light shows. This has been Bernard Ozorowski who is the president of the company, having a load of fun and maybe with one of the coolest occupations right now out there on the planet. Great having you Bernard. I’ll look for the next drone show.
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I’m a new fan.
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Thank you so much, Debbie. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to chat with you and your enthusiasm.
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Yeah, thanks. You too. You too.
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Have a great day.
