Proposing marriage, he droned on. ‘Shocked’ Boise woman pulled answer out of thin air
When Haley Turner showed up to watch a drone show at Expo Idaho in Garden City in April, she said she thought it was a fun night out with her boyfriend, Mark Carter.
They were going to an event that featured a drone show by The Go Agency, a Boise-based creative and marketing company that is Turner’s employer.
But when they first arrived, she said it was a little weird that people were telling her where to stand to get the best view. She doesn’t need to be standing in a specific spot for a drone show, she thought.
Toward the end of the show on April 21, things got a little stranger. The 200 drones floating in the sky buzzed out of what should have been their final formation and morphed into a new one: a small cat that looked like her own.
“That looks a lot like our cat Nala. That’s so cute,” Haley said, turning to her boyfriend.
The cat then turned into a palm tree, reminding her of a recent vacation. Then the drones started to spell out her name in the sky — not that she could quite tell.
“What does that say?” she asked Mark.
That’s when she saw him getting down on one knee. She looked back toward the drones to see words that were very visible:
“Will You Marry Me?”
“I knew it was going to happen at some point soon, hopefully,” Turner told the Idaho Statesman on Tuesday.
The pair have been dating since 2015, she said. They were a high school couple in Seattle and both came to Idaho to attend Boise State University, where they graduated in 2020.
“But I had no idea that it was going to happen at the drone show. I had absolutely no clue,” Turner continued. “So it was cool to be in utter shock.”
Pulling off the sky-high proposal
As elaborate as the show looked, it wasn’t too difficult to set up. Turner is the marketing director for The Go Agency, and she and Carter are friends with the agency’s CEO, Jonathan Segali.
The Go Agency was performing a drone show for the technology news website GeekWire, which was hosting its annual in-company award ceremony. Carter said he approached Segali to ask whether the agency could perform a small additional show at the end of the GeekWire presentation.
“It was just a really good cover story because they would have all the photographers and stuff there,” Carter said. “She didn’t think it was weird at all, and she just thought we were going to see GeekWire.”
Go Agency creative director Nathan Fast took control of the project. After hearing what Carter wanted to do, Fast worked with the agency’s animator to sneak in the last couple of displays.
“They made it pretty easy. I didn’t really have to do much,” Carter said with a laugh. “I just told him what I wanted to do, and they put it together.”
It took only a handful of hours for the agency to set up Carter’s proposal, he said. But for just a couple of minutes of visuals, it puts into perspective the time it takes to create some longer shows.
The battery life for a drone is about 12 to 13 minutes, Fast told the Statesman, meaning that’s the length of most shows. But the largest productions can take up to a week or longer to set up. The Go Agency previously performed a show at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas and had to use 600 drones.
Some shows are also made to create a 3D effect with the drones, such as Carter’s proposal.
But once the show is set up and the drones are released, there is one slight hitch: Unless manually stopped at a moment’s notice, the drones are going to continue on their flight path.
As for the huge “She said yes!” that popped in the sky at the end of the show?
“A few of the drone people said, ‘Good thing you said yes,’” Turner recalled. “‘Because we couldn’t reprogram it to say either or!’”
This story was originally published May 5, 2022 at 2:27 PM.
