If you run — or are thinking about launching — a drone light show business, you already know the dirty secret of the industry: the drones are the easy part. The real bottleneck is design.
Every revision costs money. Every late-stage change ripples through animation, flight planning and safety checks. I learned this first hand in the design of my own wedding drone show, which required many revisions for what was a relatively-simple show compared to the 1000+ drone shows that are seemingly the norm these days.
For drone show companies who work with clients that expect multiple rounds of approvals and increasingly complex visuals, that bottleneck can quietly destroy margins.
Wow Drone, a global drone services platform based in Delaware, believes the answer isn’t better hardware — it’s moving creative decisions earlier in the pipeline. Its new collaboration with South Korea–based PABLO AIR, which is one of the leaders in the drone light show space, offers a glimpse of what that future could look like.
Use promo code SALLYFRENCH_WOW to get 10% off your first custom animation order with Wow Drone.
Why operators keep bleeding time and money in pre-production
Wow Drone built an internal design platform focused on rapid mockups and feasibility checks — before operators commit to animation and flight programming. The idea is simple: find out what can’t be built while it’s still cheap to fix.
For operators, that matters. Industry veterans often estimate that fixing a mistake at the storyboard stage costs roughly one-tenth of what it would later in production.
They built their software tool in partnership with PABLO Air, which is based in Korea and does much of their business across Asia. Wow Drone CEO and founder Alexander Levandovskiy said many Western operators underestimate how different drone show workflows look outside the U.S. and Europe.
“In Asia the design process works differently,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Drone Girl. “It involves many more iterations and frequent approvals from the end client, and the compositions themselves tend to be more complex.”
Related read: How to make better drone show animations: Tips from a drone show judge and frequent viewer
From “pretty concept” to buildable show — faster
Wow Drone’s internal tool supports common storyboard formats — from line art to painted dot concepts — but adds an AI-assisted layer that translates visuals into production constraints.
The platform can:
- Estimate required drone counts
- Flag fly box and spatial limitations
- Quickly show whether a concept is feasible on a given fleet
That early clarity dramatically shortens pre-production timelines, especially for operators dealing with approval-heavy clients.
“It becomes clear from the start what the team can actually build,” Levandovskiy said.
Check out what the Wow Drone tool showed on the computer versus the ultimate live show:
What this partnership is — and isn’t
Wow Drone acted as a design studio for PABLO AIR’s Gumi Drone Show which occurred on Oct. 8, 2025. Wow Drone delivered animations using its internal tools — the same way it would for any client.
“We plan to expand our collaborations across key global markets and work with major operators worldwide,” Levandovskiy said, noting that Wow Drone already supports all major commercial drone show platforms.
For operators, that operator-agnostic stance matters. It means design tooling doesn’t have to lock you into a single fleet provider or control system.
And as drone shows become more mainstream, differentiation is shifting away from “we have drones” to “we can design better, faster and cheaper.”
Operators who rely on manual workflows or late-stage creative decisions may find themselves undercut by competitors who treat storyboards as a core operational asset — not an afterthought.
Will operators ever get access to these tools?
For now, Wow Drone is keeping its platform internal.
“We currently keep these tools internal until we are fully confident in their stability,” Levandovskiy said.
He said a public version could hypothetically be possible in the future, but turning it into a full product would require additional investment. If that happens, it could lower the barrier to entry for new operators — while raising expectations for established ones.
For drone show companies looking to upgrade their creative output without building an in-house animation team can get a discount when they use Wow Drone. Wow Drone is offering 10% off custom drone show animations with promo code SALLYFRENCH_WOW.
The takeaway for drone show businesses
Drone light shows are scaling fast as cities and brands look for alternatives to fireworks. But the next competitive edge won’t come from buying more drones. It will come from fixing the design pipeline that sits between client imagination and airspace reality.
For operators, the message is clear: if your storyboard process is still manual, slow or disconnected from flight constraints, it’s probably costing you more than you realize
Use promo code SALLYFRENCH_WOW to get 10% off your first custom animation order with Wow Drone.
See more of that Gumi Drone Show here:
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