Frodo Álvarez, a.k.a. Children of Darklight, is know for his MASSIVE light painting collaborations and this one is Epic! For this collaboration the team went up into the sky with a Drone Light Painting! I caught up with Frodo to ask about this incredible project and get a little more information! Check out the full interview, images and BTS video below!
Frodo congratulations on another Massive Light Painting Collaboration! This one is so cool, its such a fun concept and excellent execution! What was the massive light painting for, was it to promote a team or event?
I’ve already collaborated with this drones team in the past, so I had already dreamed on the posibility of a huge collaboration like this. But it was not until one of the agencies I usually work for had a project proposal, that we decided it was time to make some tests to see the potential or our idea and what we are capable of.
Who was involved in this project?
I worked together with the artists agency Creartys, the drones team UMILES Drone Light Show, and my good friend and also Light-Painter Mario Lechu.
What or Who sparked the inspiration for this Giant?
The project proposal for the agency involved a football championship, so here came the idea of the football player. I wanted to include the drone scene into a light painting scene in the ground, so it soon became a good idea to draw this football player about to kick the ball , and of course, the ball would be a light painted orb which we would light paint at ground level , with The Ball Of Light Tool. To complete the scene , we used 2 ledlenser MT18 filtered in green with Light Painting Paradise filters to light the ground.
What drone light painting projects have you worked on before?
In 2018 we were working in Las Vegas for Microsoft with our Live LightArt Show. Patry Diez my partner and I we are the performers there: light painting, modelling, acting.. Studio Lightpainting is in charge of the technical part, and Creartys was in charge of the production. We had there a scene were Patry acted as goddess of inspiration, and there was a star, dancing around her, and landing in her hand, which was done by a dron, whose pilot was Ernie from UMILES Drone Light Show. Here you can see a some footage of that scene:
In 2019 I also worked for UMILES Drone Light Show at the Iberian Drone League championship. At the end of the day, I was allowed to create this very special picture, with a drone doing 3 laps of the whole circuit:
Apart from this, I tried to light paint with a drone light show choreography made by my friends. Interesting results, but it just fed me with new ideas combining drone choreographies with light painting…
So it was about time, that this huge collaboration will arrive sooner or later, and we are all very happy with the results, and people’s feedback!
The lights on the drone have a Neon Light feel to them, what were they using for a light source?
They were using a 9W RGB LED board!
Was this Light Painting more or less difficult than you expected it to be?
Well, this is a team work, so the drone team worked on programming the drones for the design, and they did a really great job. By my side, the bigger challenges were that we didn’t have so much time to make rehearsals, because due to the pandemic situation, we must be at home at 11 pm… So we had to frame, set the camera to have a good exposure of the lights , compose with the orb in the right place, playing with the distance to camera to make it bigger or smaller,…
So I think it was complicated but we did a good planning and organisation of the tasks, but I know now we can do it much better. I think we all learned a lot from this experience, and next artworks will be even more impressive .
How many attempts did it take to get the final image?
We had time for just four attempts, but I would have loved to have another one.
The first image we shot with blue hour. The sky is great and it gives us a proper perspective and makes us realise the true dimensions of this Titan football player. But the orb was a little small, and there were some car light trails at the background.
So we tried to change the orb position, but it was too big, then we readjusted it in a new attempt with different orb colors but, something went wrong in my camera, so we needed a 4th attempt to get this image:
I was working with Olympus Cameras and live composite mode set at 2” , because I wanted to record the process, and that’s why the sky was so dark. I like this one very much, but it’s less epic than the first attempt with the blue sky…
So if I had had another attempt, I would have tried to have a better sky.
Other of that, I took a fast portrait to some of the members of the team, and I overlayed it in-camera with the first attempt image, as a souvenir!
You can see the behind the scenes process in this episode (with English Subtitles) at my light painting YouTube channel. Don’t hesitate to suscribe and support if you like it 😜 and follow us in IG @childrenofdarklight
The agency created a different video with English subs to show this project , you can watch it here:
Thanks a lot Jason for your support, for giving us voice to show and share this artwork to the community. We hope you all enjoyed it, and get inspired! We are light!
Thank you, and congratulations again!
We did this session with our friends Dario Cuesta and Miguel Gomez, the inspiration came from the spectacular location. It is a country house that although it was not in use, it was not abandoned, so we were lucky to get permission from the owner to go to take our photographs there. We wanted to create a light plant because the house reminded us of a mushroom and it seemed to us that it could integrate very well some type of light flower in front of this beautiful house. We only had to start designing our light plant, we did not have anything clear what its shape would be. We knew the colors we wanted to use, green to match the mushroom house and a pink to give it a good contrast, so it was time to start to practice the branches and see how the light strokes worked. Here are a few of our first practice shots.
The tools to paint the plant were 2 plexiglass rod with its adapter and some round methacrylate filters.
We made these points of light with some boxes of colored LEDs that we placed well placed on the ground. Below is a photograph of this tool that we use a lot when we need fixed continuous light. 
At this point in the tests, perhaps 2 hours had passed, many times people do not know the work behind creating a single image! Remember that it was also very cold and there were more and more tests that we did that you don’t see here. We also tried to see if we could include some sparkles but we didn’t like it so we discarded that idea.
This was the last test before launching into the final photograph, as you can see, all the lines are already in order and the mushroom house masterfully illuminated by Dario, with the Fenix FD41 flashlight. At this point, it was time to configure the camera, the settings that we used were: 
Here are the entires for the February 2021 Light Painting Photography Contest! The theme of this contest was “Flower Of Light” That means contestants needed to create a flower completely out of light! Please pick your TOP 3 favorite images and ONLY VOTE ONE TIME. Please pick the 3 different images you love based on the images alone and leave your selections in the comment section of this page. The images all have a number in the title (EXAMPLE… IF ONE OF YOUR FAVORITES IS THE IMAGE TITLED “Light Painting Contest 01″ THEN YOU SHOULD PUT THE NUMBER 01 AS ONE OF YOUR CHOICES). Voters must include 3 UNIQUE choices for your votes to be counted. In other words no 1,1,1, or 5,5,5, or 7,7,7,…..The voting will end 02/28/2021 at Midnight Eastern Standard Time, Enjoy.
