A drone display is joining the BLINK festival this year, according to Executive Director Justin Brookhart.
“We designed a drone program with over 300 drones that are going to be performing all four nights of BLINK. And it will be over the Ohio River, west of the Roebling, and they’re going to be doing some pretty incredible formations.”
Brookhart says the idea of drones has been kicked around since the beginning of the festival. He says they reviewed proposals from several companies before choosing Sky Elements to put on the show.
“They’re based out of Texas but do installations all over the country. After meeting with them, we decided these are the right folks to help us execute it,” Brookhart says. “And then we decided that we wanted to treat it how we treat every other program at BLINK. We wanted to make sure there was artistic intent and there was a designer behind it.”
That designer is Durham Studio, from Covington.
Brookhart says the location — over the Ohio River — was picked to maximize the number of people who could see it.
“There’s going to be high visibility points all along the Smale Riverfront area on the Cincinnati side. We’re really hoping to activate the Covington amphitheater area. They have great amphitheater seating already.” He says staff at CVG airport helped in making sure the drones wouldn’t interfere with flight paths.
“That’s something that we loved doing. But we said ‘Hey, we’ve done that before.' We want to think about something else that still allows us to do that dual experience, where it’s still visible on both sides of the river, still makes people feel connected, and they’re having this shared experience.”
Brookhart says there will be two 10-minute shows each night of BLINK.
BLINK is Oct. 13-16, stretching from Over-the-Rhine to Covington.
