Every spring since 2004, a regional park just south of Bakersfield, California, draws thousands of visitors hoping to catch Lightning in a Bottle — a five-day festival that blends live music with interactive art installations, wellness workshops, and a vibrant marketplace.
Each May, the festival grounds at Buena Vista Lake Aquatic Recreational Area are transformed into a vibrant music and art event, built from scratch and then dismantled without a trace.
Do LaB, a design and production company known for helping to create immersive festival experiences, leads the campground’s physical transformation. Their city planning department oversees the placement of stages, vendor kiosks, campsites, fencing, and walkways from construction through teardown. Moreover, they ensure existing utilities remain undisturbed throughout the process.
The Challenge: Inaccurate Layouts Caused Issues During Festival Construction
When he first joined Do LaB, City Planning Manager Jack Braunschweiger inherited a patchwork of old paper surveys and outdated computer-aided design (CAD) drawings of Buena Vista Lake. Aside from one reliable survey of electric assets, most records of utilities, trees, and other permanent features were inaccurate. Still, Braunschweiger imported all records into his CAD project to make use of what he could. Once in the field, he relied on manual tape measurements and best guesses to translate these records into construction layouts.
But the inaccuracies created incidents and delays.
“We would plan festival structures ahead of time in CAD, get out into the field to mark them, and realize that something like a tree would be right in the middle of where we had planned to set up a tent,” Braunschweiger said. “We had to adjust our plans on the fly. We’d make it work, but it was always a source of frustration.”
The discrepancies also led to challenges in efficiency and safety.
“In years before, construction crews hit water mains, which shut down the whole site,” Braunschweiger said. “Our water team brought on an entirely new group of people just for repairs because of how frequently things were broken in the past.”
Such incidents forced third-party construction crews to stop their work and revise their schedules during already tight turnarounds. The Do LaB team, in turn, had to quickly go back to the drawing board and develop alternate plans while under pressure.
Facing a limited timeline and budget, Do LaB wanted to develop a more reliable way to lay out the festival construction. Just as critical, they wanted to be able to share information about their grounds with third-party construction crews, many of whom travel in from across the country and are unfamiliar with the site.
The Solution: Moving to Maps with Help from Drones and GNSS
Braunschweiger knew his solution lay in developing an accurate geographic information system (GIS), which could relay and consume construction information to and from CAD as well as to and from the field. He identified drone imagery as one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to start building these accurate geospatial records. His goal was to generate high-resolution imagery of the festival grounds, which would allow him to visually rectify large portions of the legacy records.
Braunschweiger connected with Rio Hondo College GIS Professor Warren Roberts, who had performed drone surveys at other festival sites.
Roberts recommended a DJI Mavic 3E drone to gain high-resolution imagery of the festival grounds. To geo-reference the drone imagery with survey-grade accuracy, he recommended setting ground control points (GCPs) with an Arrow Gold® GNSS receiver from Eos Positioning Systems® (Eos).
In 2024, Roberts came on board as a contractor to fly the drone and acquire imagery. Braunschweiger then brought the imagery into Rhino 7, a 3D modeling software, as a basemap and laid the legacy records on top of the imagery. Next, he updated the locations of the known infrastructure, trees, and other fixed features to match the imagery. After geo-referencing as many assets as he could, Braunschweiger began laying out plans for the 2025 festival construction.
Roberts then imported Braunschweiger’s designs into ArcGIS® Online, which allowed them to publish the 2025 construction plans as web map. This made it possible for Do LaB crews and Rio Hondo volunteer students to view the map and navigate to planned structures in the field using ArcGIS Field Maps on iPad® tablets. To ensure survey-grade accuracy when staking out construction areas, they brought the same Arrow Gold the team had used for the drone flights.
GIS Guides Stake-Out
During the stake-out, Do LaB’s city planning team needed to mark construction zones ahead of third-party crews arriving. These crews — many of whom had never set foot on the festival grounds — needed to build every amenity the event required with lightning speed. To ensure they could work efficiently, the Do LaB team physically indicated the placement of amenities such as stages, tents, fences, and other items with color-coded flags.
“These construction crews do setups all over the country,” Braunschweiger said. “So, when they come in and see their setup marked clearly with flags, it makes it all a lot more streamlined.”
“Having these accurate, digital maps reduces everyone’s guesswork, allows us to lay out construction faster, and improves our layout precision.”
— Henry Hartnell, Contract GIS Specialist, Do LaB
The Do LaB team also used Braunschweiger’s plans to mark any known utilities (e.g., water mains, electric lines) so the third-party crews knew where to avoid digging, thus preventing accidental damage.
“Having these accurate, digital maps reduces everyone’s guesswork, allows us to lay out construction faster, and improves our layout precision,” said Do LaB Contract GIS Specialist Henry Hartnell.
Site Plans Get Tuned Up in Real Time
During their field work, any time the Do LaB team discovered a physical obstacle (e.g., a tree) that wasn’t in Braunschweiger’s ArcGIS plans, they mapped it. To collect the new asset in real time they used ArcGIS Field Maps, while the Arrow Gold provided survey-grade accuracy. This ensured the new data was reliable for all future uses.
Another unexpected benefit of the ArcGIS map was the ability to adjust designs on the fly. Even with precise locations, a festival layout isn’t complete until it’s seen in person. Often when the Do LaB team arrives on site for stake-out, they notice issues with scale, the geospatial relationship between structures, and even canopy, which can impact the aesthetic look and feel of an art installation. A structure might feel too large, or its placement might throw off the visual balance of the site. When art and music are the heart of a festival, these things matter.
“Visually, sometimes it doesn’t work, so there’s a little bit of fine tuning that happens out in the field,” said Braunschweiger.
This happened with one of the Do LaB’s largest art installations, “The Thing.” After flagging multiple locations for setup in the field, the team realized one of the support poles was dangerously close to a water main line. Moreover, the placement didn’t work well because of tree canopy interference. In real time, they used ArcGIS Field Maps to check for nearby infrastructure, then shifted the plans farther north to a more fitting location. Braunschweiger could see their plan adjustments in ArcGIS Online while in the office. They then staked out the new design in the field, and because their new layout was mapped, the same considerations can be taken into account for next year’s layout.
“We recorded the new locations with help from the Arrow Gold and also flew the drone to record where the structure landed,” Braunschweiger said. “We’ll use that information to inform the planning for next year.”
The Results: Setting a New Standard for Festival Construction
“The accurate drone surveys of the site coupled with the accurate GPS locations from the Arrow Gold really has changed the game on our ability to go out there and place things more accurately. There are less revisions and less surprises.”
— Jack Braunschweiger, City Planning Manager, Do LaB
Do LaB’s city planning team saw a dramatic improvement in how quickly they could set up the site in 2025 compared to 2024. The new high-accuracy mobile maps reduced guesswork, last-minute changes, and time spent laying out corrections.
“The accurate drone surveys of the site coupled with the accurate GPS locations from the Arrow Gold really has changed the game on our ability to go out there and place things more accurately,” Braunschweiger said. “There are less revisions and less surprises.”
With infrastructure precisely mapped, Do LaB crews streamlined plan adjustments and stake-out while improving maps of the grounds for future festival plans. Meanwhile, thanks to the construction zones being precisely staked out, third-party contractors avoided costly mistakes and gained greater confidence in the layout provided by Do LaB.
No Light, No Limits: The Unexpected Bonus of After-Dark Accuracy
“With the accurate locations from the Arrow Gold, it’s like having a cheat code.”
— Jack Braunschweiger, City Planning Manager, Do LaB
The technology also gave the Do LaB team an unexpected advantage: more time for the stake-out. Instead of being limited by daylight, they could continue laying out construction zones late into the evening — a huge bonus in the fast-paced world of festival production.
“In the past, we would be working against the sun, because we’d have to visually reference things in the field,” Braunschweiger said. “With the accurate locations from the Arrow Gold, it’s like having a cheat code.”
This flexibility proved vital when a last-minute stage change came late one night.
“I was able to go out in the field at midnight and place all the points myself under the moon with some music playing,” Braunschweiger said. “It was cool to come back and watch them install it just a couple of days later.”
Planning the Encore
Do LaB expects the benefits of using GIS for creating, viewing, and managing data to compound year over year. With each festival layout on the record, they will be able to reference increasingly accurate ground-truthed information about the festival grounds — making every build smoother than the last.
Looking ahead, the team hopes to take advantage of the new Eos Skadi Series™ GNSS receivers at the next festival. With the capabilities of the Skadi Smart Handle™ — such as the Extensible Virtual Range Pole™ mode — students will be able to collect accurate data even in areas that were previously difficult to map.
“With this technology, I’m able to impact so many different teams and make their lives easier,” Braunschweiger said. “That is super rewarding to me.”
Professor Warren Roberts would like to thank his students and the Rio Hondo College community for their support in the classroom and in the field. Those interested in similar coursework can learn more through the Rio Hondo College GIS page.
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