LEXINGTON, ALA. - Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald's gently drifting over Los Angeles.

A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has created a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos -- Flogos, as he calls them.

Francisco Guerra, who's also a former magician, developed a machine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.

The Walt Disney Co. will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Guerra said.

"It's a shock factor when you look up and there's a logo over your head," said Guerra, whose company, Snowmasters, makes machines that churn out fake snow and foam for Hollywood movies and special events.

He developed Flogos at his small factory in northern Alabama.

A Flogo machine works a little like a Play-Doh Fun Factory, the $5 toy that children use to squeeze colorful putty into stars, circles and other shapes.

A boxlike contraption produces a specially formulated white foam in a big round tub and forces it upward through a stencil. Once the foam is several inches thick, a metal cutter slices it, and a faux cloud floats into the sky. Guerra's company is working on a version that will spit out 6-foot clouds.

The foam is environmentally safe because it's mostly water, air and a soapy agent that creates bubbles, Guerra says. Flogos pop just like bubbles and disappear when they hit a tree or building, sometimes leaving a powdery residue that blows away.

A single Flogo can travel as far as 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet, Guerra says, and a machine can produce one every 15 seconds. Guerra says he could put a half-dozen machines together and fill the sky with almost any shape a company orders.

The company has lined up international distributors in Australia, Germany, Mexico and Singapore. A machine rents for about $3,500 a day, Guerra said.

Matt Leible of New York-based Generation Outdoor, an ad agency specializing in outdoor advertising, said companies can spend $5,000 a day for a banner towed by an airplane, and skywriting can cost $4,500.

One expert said the idea sounds catchy,but wondered how Flogos will fare against a backdrop of controlled airspace, environmental sensitivity and concerns over legal liability in case something goes wrong, like a pilot being distracted by a swarm of floating tomahawks above an Atlanta Braves game.

"People will look at them. The question is what happens after people look at them," said Leonard M. Lodish, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.