The story of How we got this shot… and why we didn’t just fake it!
October 17 was a picture-perfect football saturday in Ann Arbor.
55 degrees, sunny, hardly a cloud in the sky, and you could see for miles. Michigan was hosting Penn State at The Big House at 3:30, and we spent an hour before kickoff in a helicopter over the stadium, trying to capture a clean photo of our banner with the stadium in the background.
If you've been to a Michigan football game before, you know who typically flies these aerial ads: car dealerships, seltzer and cannabis brands, and the kind of clubs that don't put their hours on a sign. We figured, hey, it must work if they keep doing it. So why not us? Heck, this might be the most wholesome thing anyone’s ever looked up and seen on a game day.
Then came the real challenge: we also wanted photos and videos of it (real ones).
We learned that drones – the efficient and inexpensive option – are strictly off-limits around the stadium on game days (and over most U of M property regardless of the day). So we decided to rent a helicopter.
Then we called Dale Fisher, who has been capturing The Big House professionally from the sky and press box since 1954. He's a local legend. He brought his assistant, Jonathan Knight, and tapped his pilot friend Alan (with White Pine Helicopters) for the job. In for a penny, in for a pound…
We lifted off in Alan's R-44 Raven II from the Ann Arbor Municipal Airport at 1:30pm. What a feeling that was. The nerves faded fast once we settled into cruising altitude (around 1,500 feet, if I recall correctly) with perfect air conditions.
It was a blast. You could easily make out Detroit and Windsor to the east and fall colors were close to peaking, rolling out along the Huron River as far as you could see. And right below us, all the pre-game commotion: tailgates packed onto the golf course, crowds streaming toward the gates, the whole town getting loud. It's a fun way to see Ann Arbor.
Getting quality shots was another story.
There were SIX planes flying banners that afternoon (we expected one or two others based on previous game days). This complicated things colossally, with all those planes circling the same small loop. To get usable photos, our banner, the stadium, and the right angle have to line up at the same moment, with no one else's banner in the frame and a helicopter keeping a safe distance from all of it…
Alan worked the airspace skillfully while Dale and Jonathan worked the cameras. Lap after lap we'd get close, and then another plane would drift into the shot, or ours would turn the wrong way at critical moment.
But nobody quit despite the pressure. Alan kept repositioning, Dale kept shooting, and eventually it all lined up. The photos in this post are the result: Don T. Rat over the Big House, tailgates filling in below, campus in full fall color.
It took a pilot, a photographer with more than seven decades of experience working this stadium, his assistant, a banner crew, and lots of patience.
Thank you, Dale!
In preparation for the flight/shoot and afterwards, we got to spend a couple hours of one-on-one time with Dale at his Grass Lake studio. If you ever get the chance to meet him, take it! He's quick with a joke, replete with great stories, and has seen every corner of Washtenaw County from the sky.
He’s also very generous. He gifted us a framed print of our banner shot, and he also handed me a print from the 2021 Ohio State game (aka… the second best day of my life). Dale has also spent years using his photography to give back. His donated prints have raised thousands of dollars for childhood cancer research through the ChadTough Foundation. It's worth a read.
If you want a piece of Michigan Football on your wall, his game day photos are for sale at Dale Fisher Galleries. Go get one!
Explaining Why we did this the hard way…
Could we have just prompted ChatGPT or another AI platform to create a "rat mascot banner over michigan stadium" and gotten something close to this? Probably. Plenty of companies would. Plenty of companies do…
We see more and more AI being used to misrepresent pest control and other home services companies. A different Ann Arbor pest control company's Google profile is full of smiling technicians, clean trucks, happy homeowners on the front porch. Except none of it is real. The techs don't exist and the homeowners don't exist. The pictures were fabricated by an AI program in a few minutes.
It doesn't stop at photos. There are "local" listings that aren't local at all. Earlier this fall, a homeowner out near Pinckney posted on NextDoor that every time she called what looked like a pest company in Chelsea or Pinckney, she ended up talking to a national chain. She just wanted someone nearby to take care of her carpenter ants. Add door-to-door sales crews working neighborhoods off a script, and you get the picture:
Unfortunately, A lot of this industry has decided it's easier to look like a business than to be one.
That's the problem. If a company is willing to fake a photo, why would you trust it to tell you the truth about what's going on in your attic?
Don T. Rat, our mascot, was designed by real people. Our marketing team conceives and creates what you see from us. No AI. That costs more and takes longer, and we're fine with it. If you want folks around here to actually recognize you, on a banner, a truck, a yard sign, you have to put something real in front of them. Not generic slop designed to be neutral, uncreative, and inoffensive.
Real people, real work, real neighbors is what we do. It's slower and it's more expensive. It's also the only way we know to build a name and brand that means something.
This banner flies again before the MSU game this Saturday, November 7. If you're tailgating, look up. That's us.
