Name: How Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade BALLOONS are Made🎈
Uploaded: 2025-11-26T00:16:55.000Z
Duration: 5 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every November, Macy's hosts its Thanksgiving Day parade.

Huge colorful balloons fill the skies of New York City.

How do they make these wonderful balloons?

We went to the Macy's Parade studio to find out.

I'm the vice president of Macy's studio and you're here today to learn about Macy's giant balloons.

Step one, the sketch, pencil and paper, noodling poses, then color.

Then ultimately we have our color scheme sketch of the balloon in the air with all the lines attached.

A three dimensional clay model so that we can see the dinosaur all the way around and in scale.

If you were standing next to him, you would be about that big.

Next, workers have to cut out pieces of plastic to make the balloon.

So come on with me and we'll go into our balloon studio where we have some balloon models and some actual balloons inflated.

Once the balloon is put together, it's time to paint.

They paint the legs, body, head, eyes, even a big nose.

The hippo, as you can tell by her ten foot smile.

All of the balloons have lines attached to them that go to the handlers and what we call a dog bone.

People hold the lines and that's how they control the balloon in the parade.

So for creating a Macy balloon, yeah, there's a lot of art, but

We have to figure out how much gas needs to go inside the balloon so that the balloon will fly.

The gas inside the balloons is called helium.

But first they test the balloons by putting air inside.

How do they get all that air inside the balloon?

Let's ask John to put the gas inside the balloon.

We have what we call inflation sleeves because it looks like the sleeve on your shirt.

Once that's inside, We can turn on the blower and start to inflate and you're going to see the rest of the balloon raise up in the air as more and more of the gas goes inside.

It's just like when you have a balloon that you blow into with your mouth.

At first it's real floppy, but the more gas that you put in, the tighter it gets.

The day before the parade, all the balloons will be filled with helium gas.

Helium is what makes the balloons fly up in the air.

And in the morning they will fly in the parade.

At the end of the parade, we have to let all of the helium gas out of the balloon.

So we have special deflation ports hidden on the balloons.

I'm going to show you what it looks like inside a Macy's balloon.

I bet most people don't get to see the inside of a parade balloon.

Hey, John, is there anything else about the balloons that surprises people?

Because even when you try to explain to somebody that you're only this big next to the model, when you see that balloon fully inflated for the first time, you become a kid again.

Your eyes pop open, your jaw drops, and you wonder, how did they do that?

A lot of people work here at Macy's studio.

We have carpenters and metal workers, illustrators.

We have sculptors and painters and balloonatics who work on the balloons.

But everybody who works here has to be three things.

You got to be part engineer, and you can't grow up.

So now that you've visited the Macy's studio and you know what really goes into it, the science and the art, I invite you to come see the parade yourself.

Or watch it on television and see it with whole new eyes, knowing that there's more to it than just putting on a parade.

How are the parade balloons different from birthday balloons?