Sky Elements Gives a Peek Into What's Next After Simon Cowell Broke the 'AGT' Golden Buzzer Rule for Them

This season on America’s Got Talent, Simon Cowell was so knocked out by the performance of drone company Sky Elements that he broke the rules—one Golden Buzzer per judge—to award a second Golden Buzzer within the same episode, giving Sky Elements a liftoff to the Live Shows.

For its audition, the Dallas-based company programed 1,000 drones—combining technology with art—to make a dazzling light display unlike anything ever seen on AGT before. In fact, it was so large (400 feet tall by 300 feet wide) that Simon and fellow judges Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum and Sofia Vergara as well as the audience had to go outside to view it as it lit up the sky over Pasadena.

Tonight, Sky Elements returns with an all-new show that promises to be just as spectacular as the NASA-themed launch of a rocket ship into space audition when it will take to the sky with a carnival theme.

“The biggest thing I think we’re going to show—and I don’t want to give away too much—is we’re going to be more inclusive with all the judges,” Preston Ward, chief pilot for Sky Elements, tells Parade in this exclusive interview. “We gave Simon a little love [last time], so I think we might try to incorporate more of the judges into this.”

Tonight’s drone show has been created from the ground up exclusively for AGT and it’s a time-consuming process. First the team must come up with the idea, then storyboard it, followed up by mockups and revisions.

“We’ll take the images and make those and paint those into dots,” Preston says, explaining the process. “So, for this show, we’re going to be using a thousand drones like we did in our audition show. We would mock those up with the dots. And then from there, once we like the looks of all the formations, we’ll go to the animation phase.”

Related: See the Mind-Blowing AGT Golden Buzzer Act That Made Simon Cowell Break the Rules

It’s the animation phase that is the most time consuming. Tonight’s show took 150 hours to produce just the animation.

“It’s a couple of weeks’ worth of work to make it all happen,” he continues. “And then the day of, it’s about an eight-hour set up to get everything ready and make sure everything’s working so that all that hard work comes to fruition. There’s so much that can go wrong at the last minute that you might have to overcome issues with sites or all that. I can’t wait for everybody to see what we put together.”

And neither can we!

In our Zoom interview, Preston also chatted about the road for Sky Elements to get to AGT, why drone shows are better for the environment than fireworks, how he and Brian Geck built their company, and what they’ll do with the $1 million.

Since AGT is an indoor show, what made you think that Sky Elements would be a possibility for it?

We just thought we’d give it a try and see if there was a way to incorporate us into the program. Because we have so many talented people, including Brian Geck, our creative director, I was like, “We really need to show what he can do.” And so, we worked with production to figure out a way to make it happen because up until now, they had really been confined to the theater. When you look at the world of drone shows, there’s indoor drone shows and outdoor drone shows. And the indoor drone shows just don’t do drone shows justice. The outdoor shows are so much bigger, so much better. We were just thrilled that they were willing to work with us and change it up a little bit to get everybody outside to showcase what we could do.

Simon broke the rules to give you a second Golden Buzzer. What did that mean to your team?

It was amazing to be the first-ever second Golden Buzzer that a judge got to give out. We spent so much time—hundreds and hundreds of hours preparing for what we put on there—and to get the Golden Buzzer and to have the fireworks go off behind us, it was just such an amazing moment to be a part of and we were just so thrilled.

Related: Find Out Who Went Home on America’s Got Talent Tonight and Who Made the Semifinals!

Tell me something good that’s happened since you’ve been on AGT.

We’ve gotten tons of people reaching out that saw us on the program that want us to go further. We’ve also gotten people that have hired us just because we were on AGT, they reached out and they were like, “We were thinking about drone companies, but you guys were on AGT, and we want to bring you in and work on this project.” It’s just been amazing.

I understand that Sky Elements did 50 drone shows for the Fourth of July, which is more than 60 percent of the drone shows in the United States.

I think that week we did 68 drone shows from June 30th to July 7th. We do about 60 percent of all the shows that happen in the U.S., so on the Fourth of July itself, we did 22 different drone shows all over the country. If you look at the rest of the people doing drone shows combined, I think it was eight. So just on the Fourth of July alone, we did two and a half times more than everybody else did.

That’s incredible and that takes a lot of manpower. Your company must be a good size by now.

We’re still a small team. We’re nimble. We know how to staff up and bring in people when we need some help. Brian, my best friend and our creative director, designed so many of the shows. Brian is an amazing artist and the things that he can make with just dots, I’m blown away with some of the things that he comes up with. He has a hand in everything. A lot of work goes into it; a lot of sleepless nights to make these things happen. We’re slowly growing, but we’re not as big as people would think.

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Brian and you met in college. Talk about how you started. You’ve said you originally started with Christmas lights.

We always enjoyed animated Christmas lights. In college, we put lights on my parents’ house that we synchronized to music. From there, it just got bigger and better. And then one day, Brian and I were talking about the summer and what we were going to do and we decided to get some fireworks. We started doing that, and then we had a fireworks company where we would put on municipal displays and always try to go bigger and better.

Then one day we saw a drone show and we’re like, “You know what? That looks different. That looks interesting. I wonder what it would take to do that?” I used to be an attorney. That was my full-time job. Brian used to work for a government agency. So, we were doing all these things on the weekend until the drone shows started to really take off, and we work full time together now. We’re just doing so much. And it’s quite frankly, living the dream of getting to work with my best friend and doing something that’s so unique and so amazing that every single show is different, every location is different. The clients we get to work with are just so incredible that I’m so happy to be a part of it.

Also, there’s a whole safety factor involved with drone shows. With fireworks, fire is always a consideration. But it’s more than just the absence of fire; drones are more pollution-free, right? So, people that have breathing problems can see a drone show where they might not be able to attend a fireworks show.

Some of the other areas that we’ve seen is people with sensory issues. When you have fireworks, they’re loud. They can startle people. We’ve had people come up to us after that said, “My son has never been able to sit through a fireworks show because it’s just too much. It’s too overwhelming for him. But when we saw a drone show, we thought we’d give that a try.” And they’re like, “I’ve never seen him so happy looking at something.”

So, it’s all those things. You take out the fire danger. It’s more environmentally friendly. There’s no trash left. There’s a ton of trash and debris left after every fireworks show. And no matter how much you clean, there’s always bits of paper, bits of debris that end up everywhere. With a drone show, everything we bring out and send in the sky, we pick up and take it with us.

Another advantage of a drone show over a fireworks show is you can incorporate music. How do you pick the music and what kind of clearances do you have to get?

Music selection is always the hardest part because music can tell so much of the story, right? If we’re making the visuals, we really have to dial into what those lyrics are, what we want to do, so figuring out the right music usually takes us almost as long as deciding the show.

And then for AGT, we must have everything cleared. So, we’ll usually come up with a couple of options while we’re in the process of animating and in the process of putting it all together. That way we can fine tune it to the music and really put something special together that’s all in sync.

Related: Why Drone Shows May Replace Fireworks, According to Experts

If you win, it’s a $1 million prize. Is that something that you would reinvest in the company? Or would you do something fun?

If we win, we’re going to do a tour around America, and we really want to focus on areas that don’t often get a drone show. Here in L.A., we do drone shows just about every week. But we want to take it to smaller places that don’t often get a drone show, really focus on communities that really need something to look forward to.

One of the shows we do every year for charity is a Christmas show in my hometown that is a toy drive. It’s one of our favorite shows because it is all about giving back to the community and we want to do more things like that all over the country. Then anything that’s left, we’re going to donate to charity in honor of my late daughter, Briley.

Is it a specific charity in case others want to donate as well?

I’m not sure if we’ve decided yet. Normally, we do Hope Mommies. When we were on Great Christmas Light Fight and won that, we donated 100 percent of that prize money to them.

America’s Got Talent airs performance shows on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC with results revealed on Wednesday nights also at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Streams next day on Peacock.

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