Second Collaboration with Central Park
January 2025. iDRONE is once again trusted by Central Park Mall Jakarta to celebrate Chinese New Year — this time the Year of the Snake, Orient Vibes edition. This is our second collaboration after the hugely successful Chinese New Year 2024, and expectations are rising even higher.
Our brief: the show should reflect the character of the Year of the Snake 2025 — elegant, mysterious, intuitive. Not a horror snake, but a lucky snake in Chinese culture tradition which symbolizes wisdom and abundance.
Moving Snake Design
It's an interesting animation challenge: how to make 100 drones look like snakes moving sinusoidally through the air? The trick is the sequential transition — the drones don't all move at once, but instead move in a wave pattern from head to tail, creating the illusion of fluid snaking movement.
We created three snake sequences: a small snake that clumps together then stretches into a long snake, two snakes that coil around each other to form an infinity symbol, and a snake that opens its mouth wide to release 'fire' (an explosion pattern of drone points). Each sequence requires different movement physics calculations.
Tribeca Park as Stage
Tribeca Park in Central Park Jakarta is a premium outdoor venue that is well open to the sky, but surrounded by tall buildings on all sides. The GPS challenge is similar to the show at Blok M Square. We placed additional antenna arrays at 4 points to get optimal signal triangulation.
Thousands of visitors to Central Park and residents of nearby apartments became de facto spectators — watching from balconies, from windows, from park areas. This is what we love about urban venues: the audience reaches far beyond the officially invited guests.
Chinese New Year in Different Years
2024 is the Year of the Dragon — dramatic and explosive. 2025 is the Year of the Snake — elegant and subtle. Central Park's consistency in presenting a drone show for Chinese New Year every year is building a new tradition: the people of Jakarta are already looking forward to the 'Central Park Chinese New Year drone show' as part of their celebration calendar. That is the power of an event brand that is built consistently.
