UK - A heartwarming Christmas story told through projection-mapped animations in the run-up to Christmas is being driven by tvONE's Green Hippo brand of Hippotizer Media Servers onto the façade of The Queens Hotel in Leeds.
The animation, To Leeds, With Love, is brought to the city by LeedsBID (Leeds Business Improvement District). It is a reimagining of The 12 Days of Christmas song, featuring a cheeky gingerbread man who is on a mission to decorate the hotel for a festive party.
Two Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 Media Servers are powering video onto the front of the historic hotel via seven Panasonic projectors – five RQ50K, one RQ25K, and one RZ21K, with one other RQ50K backup being stored off-site in the event of a hardware issue. They are positioned in two 7.5m tall towers constructed in Leeds City Square, in front of the hotel building. It is the second year in a row that the projection mapping has happened at the hotel, with an estimated 200,000 people watching it in 2023.
Pro Audio Systems (PAS) was commissioned to co-ordinate and supply every technical aspect of the installation with Motion Mapping supplying the Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 Media Servers – one active and one backup – to PAS for the installation. “The Karst+ MK2 Media Servers provided more than enough power and outputs for this installation despite their compact size, which was required to fit into the small on-site control cabin,” says Chris Beardwell from PAS, who worked on the technical aspects of the projection.
PAS oversaw the specification, supply and installation of all the projectors, networking, playback and control, as well as a substantial audio system. Its team was central to designing the video systems to ensure that the content was seamlessly projected onto the ‘canvas’ of The Queens Hotel to achieve complete coverage with optimal brightness.
“We engaged the services of laser mapping specialists Autoplot to scan the building to give us an accurate model of The Queens Hotel, which could be passed on to the content creators to enable optimal design of the content,” adds Beardwell. “Using the provided laser scan, and the subsequently produced model, we were able to use Green Hippo’s Shape software to accurately predict the projectors’ positioning, coverage and blend areas before we got to site.”
At the makeshift hotel technical FOH, the Motion Mapping team aligned all the projectors utilising Shape. “Shape allowed us to align the projectors to the hotel accurately and its flexibility allowed us to overcome any potential issues with the model, projector placement or any unforeseen last-minute changes using its advanced feature set,” explains Beardwell. “Between myself and Motion Mapping we programmed the servers to playback the content via various presets and to accept external show control triggers using Multicontroller.
“Throughout the entire installation, I can’t question the reliability of the Karst+ MK2 Media Servers. They were powered on and operating 24/7 for the duration and they needed to be as flexible as possible with their deployment, whilst also being reliable throughout. The servers ticked all the boxes and didn’t skip a beat.”
To Leeds, With Love runs up to Sunday 22 December between 4.30pm-8.30pm, with showings every 30 minutes. It was written by Yorkshire screenwriter Lisa Holdsworth and narrated by The Hobbit and North & South actor Richard Armitage. The projection is a collaboration between LeedsBID and the Barcelona-based creative studio Onionlab, with support from Victoria Leeds and Pro Audio Systems.
