Couple behind Clovis’ Santa Claus Lane takes the light show to the sky — with drones

It wasn’t easy for Terry and Deb Toews to step away from Santa Claus Lane.

The couple for five years set up an entire neighborhood’s worth of synchronized holiday lights (up to 40 houses by the end) for a nightly Christmas show in Clovis. It was almost a second full-time job for each of them, but worth the effort to see the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who came through to enjoy the spectacle.

And then, it wasn’t.

Even if the pandemic hadn’t disrupted things, the joy had begun to fade. The couple held the last Santa Clause Lane event in 2019. “The fun, the hobby,” Terry Toews says, “it became work.”

Deb Toews says the community kind of mourned when Santa Claus Lane shut down. She wrote in a social media message at the time, “This is not goodbye.”

And it wasn’t.

The couple is back with a new endeavor and a new take on holiday lights display.

Early this month, the Toews announced they would be doing a “Holi-Drone” Christmas light show at the Clovis Rodeo Grounds, in conjunction with Fresno Street Eats.

The couple will use 100 drones to create a one-of-a-kind synchronized holiday light experience set to music.

The show will run on the hour, three times a night, from Dec. 6-8 at the Clovis Rodeo Grounds. Shows start at 6 p.m. The event will also feature food trucks, shopping vendors and free pictures with Santa. Tickets are $15, or $5 for children, and on sale now.

What is a drone light show?

This will be the first major event for Skye Dreams, the drone-based aerial entertainment company the Toews started in September.

This is a relatively new but emerging market that has been seen at the Super Bowl, at Metallica concerts and on “America’s Got Talent: Extreme.” You can search that footage on Youtube.

The Toews actually worked with Verge Aero, a company featured on “America’s Got Talent” in April, to acquire some 110 drones, which they transport to and from performances in protective black cases.

They only use 100 of the drones for most shows. The remainder are on standby as backups if needed.

The drones are slightly larger then the ones you might find on Amazon or at WalMart. Instead of a camera, these drones have a 900 lumen LED color-changing light and software that syncs to magnetic north. The drones then communicate between various overhead satellites and a base station computer, which has individual flight patterns and lighting controls.

When flown in unison, the drones create some stunning visual affects.

Deb is the visual creator in charge of the drones’ flight plans, which she makes in a program that overlays them as individual dots on a map of the night sky.

“People love patterns,” Deb says, but there’s almost no limit to what she can create; a 3-D jack-o’-lantern for Halloween or a waving American Flag for the 4th of July.

Or Santa and his prancing reindeer for Christmas.

The drones are kept in check by geo fencing markers. The drones are spaced 1.5 meters apart to they don’t hit each other. A much larger fence sets the outer boundaries for the swarm as its moves across the sky.

The drones are launched 100 feet from the audience and operate at anywhere from 100 feet to 400 feet in the air. The created images are specifically titled toward the crowd for better viewing, but also as a precaution. If the drones were to fail, the Toews don’t want them smashing into each other as they drop.

Typically, a show runs 10 to 12 minutes. That’s the limit on the drone’s battery life.

The batteries get swapped out between each performance. So, the drones travel with extra battery packs; 300 of them on a given night.

The future for Skye Dreams

In its one month of operation, the Skye Dreams team — the Toews, plus another FAA-certified drone pilot and a ground crew — have made two dozen flights and several public appearances. They ran shows at Clovis Night Out and the Great Kearney BBQ Smoke Out and, just last weekend at the Team Skream haunted attraction at Belmont and McCall avenues.

Eventually, the Toews hope to add two more certified pilots along with more ground crew and drones. Three hundred drones would be enough to allow the company to run multiple performances at the same time and also create some of the really large scale pieces, Terry says, like a giant scannable QR code.

While Skye Dream is very much a business proposition for the Toews, in that it’s not a nonprofit like Santa Claus Lane, it is still all about creating community events and entertaining people.

In that way, it hits on the same emotional level that Santa Claus Lane did.

“It’s one word,” Terry says.

“Joy.”