Navarra Venues marked its 50th anniversary and teased the upcoming wedding season with a spectacular Sydney drone stunt following VIVID Festival’s light show on 9th June.
A huge cluster of drones lit up the night sky with the Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House in the backdrop, moving in formation to depict a romantic proposal – from the man on bended knee to the woman’s hand with a sparkling ring on her finger. Navarra’s drone show was scheduled to follow the official VIVID Sydney drone show, which fittingly had the 2024 theme ‘Love Is In The Air’.
Navarra revealed that the drone show was not, in fact, an IRL event, but a clever CGI campaign created for social media. The Navarra team worked with Sydney digital creators Passenger Studio to create a fake yet convincing drone show during the peak days of the city’s VIVID Festival. Passenger Studios had just one week to pull off the stunt – and judging by the reaction on social media, most followers believed they were watching a real-life light show!
Planning for this innovative stunt began in early June, with the Passenger Studios team making a recce to Circular Quay to test out angles, find the best locations to shoot from, and begin planning the content.
“I created the 3D drone show using a program called Houdini which is a standard for Hollywood-level VFX. It was a fairly basic particle system created in 3D space to real-world scale. 3D cameras were created inside a life-size 3D model of Circular Quay and we roughly matched the 3D cameras to the video footage to achieve a believable perspective,” said Richard Stewart, director of Passenger Group.
Passenger Studios has expertise in Architectural Visualisation and has worked on some of the biggest global projects in this space including Hudson Yards in New York and The Line in Saudi Arabia, so they were the natural partner for this CGI campaign. With the content created, it was then up to Navarra’s marketing team to share the video across its social media platforms just after the VIVID light show on 9th June. The content was posted on Instagram and TikTok with captions sharing the ‘Marry Me’ drone show and encouraging followers to comment if they saw it or tag friends and family.
By the morning of 10th June Navarra’s drone show had been viewed 40,000 times and engagement levels were rocketing across both digital platforms. Social media stats so far for the campaign as a whole (across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook) are below:
- Total reach: 405,095
- Total likes: 15,420
- Total comments: 369
- Total saves: 1,435
- Total shares: 5,853
On Instagram, the drone light show had 263,000 views, 5,489 likes, 3,431 shares, 236 comments and 591 saves. It has been Navarra’s best-performing Instagram post in the last 12 months.
On TikTok, the clip had 131,900 views, 9,846 likes, 2,425 shares, 124 comments and 846 saves.
Navarra has had an increase of approximately 300 per cent in website visits since the drone show campaign launched.
“When the idea came to create a CGI drone show in the midst of Vivid, I wasn’t 100 per cent sold on the idea, but my senior marketing coordinator, Sophia Voulgaris insisted we pursue this out-of-the-box idea and I’m glad we listened because it’s been one of the best marketing activations we’ve launched in a long while,” said Romeo Jahjah, sales and marketing manager, Navarra Venues.
