Creamfields
Creamfields is an electronic dance music festival series founded and organised by British club promoter Cream, with its UK edition taking place on August Bank Holiday weekend, with a number of international editions held across various territories worldwide.
The Client
The first edition of Creamfields took place at Matterley Estate in Winchester, before moving to Liverpool’s old airfield from 1999. In 2006 redevelopment of the site saw the festival take up its current home in Daresbury, Cheshire, initially retaining the one-day format before adding camping and moving to two days in 2008, expanding to three days in 2011, and four days in 2016.
In terms of area, capacity, lineup, size and number of stages, Creamfields is firmly established as one of the “big four” international electronic music festivals alongside Ultra, EDC, and Tomorrowland. There have also been multiple international editions of the festival across the years, ranging from Ibiza, to Chile, to Hong Kong.
In 2022, Creamfields celebrated its 25th anniversary by launching a second UK-based festival - Creamfields South, which took place at Hylands Park, Chelmsford across the Platinum Jubilee weekend in June. The festival is now looking to become a firm fixture on the UK festival calendar, with tickets already on sale for the second edition on Spring Bank Holiday weekend in late May 2023.
"As a general rule, only festival brands with a certain established calibre can stage a large festival in a new location and make it a huge success. It was great working at the Inaugral of Creamfields South over the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend."
Pete Goulding, Managing Director of Aerius DronesBrief
Andy Owen Marketing & Creative Director for Cream requested our availability over the Jubilee bank holiday weekend to capture a variety of aerial videography across the complete festival site for the inaugural of Creamfields South.
Before accepting any brief we work through any challenges that we could potentially be faced with. When working through our briefing manual, we were presented with the small challenges of trying to establish safe take-off, and landing zones alongside flight paths given the class of drone that Aerius Drones we’re planning to use. We worked closely with the team at Creamfields to eradicate these challenges.
What we did
- Writing detailed Risk Assessments to be shared with the team at Cream and the on-site Health & Safety Officer
- Mapping out exclusion zones & flight paths
- Pre-site survey
- Weather plan
- NOTAM Checks
Following the completion of these tasks, we created a full jon pack that included a complete method statement and all of the above to be sent to Creamfields to be agreed and green-lighted.
Authorisation from CAA was approved and a GVC certificate was provided to the festival site.
Implementation
The team travelled down and arrived on-site for a briefing with the fantastic marketing team Tom Williams & Karl Eaves & initially worked through the take-off & landing zones they had identified following previous conversations about how this could pose a small challenge to the Aerius team.
Following this, we worked through the day-to-day schedule to highlight key performances & scheduled VFX to ensure we were in the sky and ready to capture the priority list of content. The team then conducted various test flights to ensure all technical adjustments were made prior to the festival starting.
Throughout the weekend, we captured a variety of content across the festival site, including the ingress areas (main gates, queueing lanes, etc), main stages, arena areas, campsites, and other areas. We made sure to streamline the process, working to collect, check, then off-load content as soon as it was captured, ensuring the on-site video editors had plenty of content to include in their daily highlight videos.
The highlight of Day 1 was capturing the 2020 & 2021 #1 voted DJ David Guetta alongside multi-platinum success Fatboy Slim with Day 2 seeing us capture the Maestros MK & Calvin Harris.
"As a general rule, only festival brands with a certain established calibre can stage a large festival in a new location and make it a huge success. It was great working at
the Inaugral of Creamfields South over the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend"
