As the world’s first guitar-shaped hotel, owners of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., knew they couldn’t skimp on anything since they’d surely be getting a lot of attention. So they turned their 400-foot tall façade into a video wall, complete with 2.3 million LED lights, video mapping and lasers. [related]
Powered by a single RealMotion 4 Karat Gold Series server, the entire facade of the $1.5 billion hotel is now one of the world’s most unique digital sculptures, capable of presenting a multitude visual effects and presentations.
The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino project was managed, directed, engineered and installed by Boston-based custom fabricator DCL (Design Communications LTD).
“The front facade of the hotel is both a media system and a dynamic sculpture,” said Geoffrey Platt, director of RealMotion, in the announcement. “It will serve as a screen and stage to daily musical showcases.
“The shows will be a testament to how music has been instrumental in defining Hard Rock hotels, restaurants and entertainment properties around the world,” he said.
The hotel’s recent grand opening celebration featured generative and sound reactive-content created by Float4. The event featured a grand reveal of what the guitar can do, establishing the guitar as the static architecture icon.
The official guitar SMASH experience marks the beginning of a custom drum sequence, which triggers a guitar activation. The show then journeys through different decades and musical styles, including cascading waterfalls of light and energy as transitions, a 3D guitar effect and lasers extending into the sky to represent guitar strings.
The RealMotion team used ISAAC, an integrated scheduling and automation control platform created by Smart Monkeys, to develop a system to ingest content into the 4 Karat Server to manage and synchronize the millions of content elements of the show, said Platt.
More About the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
The facade has five core elements that can each be used for specific effects:
- The Front and Back are the main sections on which dynamic content can be video mapped.
- The Outline delineates the edges of the guitar shape, and content plays with this aspect by hiding and revealing the guitar’s contours.
- The Sides enhance the illusion of depth for visual effects
- The Strings, which utilize lasers instead of LEDs, are used to show vertical motion and effects such as fountains, chord strums and string plucks.
- The Spandrel Glass section is ideal for expanding content from the face and body to create the illusion of another level of content.
The goal of this project was to enable a long-term digital sculpture installation that can display new content and themes as the owners desire, said Jeff Grantz, director of creative technologies at DCL, in the announcement.
RealMotion built the content system in such a way that Hard Rock would be able to make relatively quick adjustments that could otherwise take hours of video rendering to complete. To achieve this, RealMotion used image sequencing instead of video, so that any changes would only require replacing or editing images within the sequence, eliminating the need for a new video file to be rendered.
Under DCL’s direction, Float4 also developed two additional content pieces. The Sunset Ceremony sets a festive tone for every evening with visual imagery of a scenic sunset and a guitar playing spirit with audio-reactive elements.
The “Smooth” piece is a homage to the end of the classic rock era as it transitioned to contemporary music, based on the collaboration by Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas and Latin rock band Santana and includes psychedelic artwork, a silhouette of a Latina dancer, electric energy and festive patterns, and creative transitions such as a river of light and flocking simulations.
Ambient content plays when none of the major shows are scheduled, so there is always something to see.
