Burj Khalifa, developed and owned by Emaar Properties Dubai, rises 2,722 feet and 163 stories to pierce the desert skyline. It teamed with SACO on an initiative to light up the skyscraper’s east façade and provide high-resolution video capabilities for what became the ‘Light Up 2018’ New Year’s celebration. The groundbreaking show, viewed by more than one million people on site, earned a Guinness World Record for the largest laser light and sound show on a single building.
The SACO solution, which utilised its innovative V-Stick technology has 20 times more resolution than the previous system and extends virtually the entire height of the structure. It comprises more than 17 miles of V-Stick LED video/light fixtures and boasts 1,139,144 RGB pixels, mapped and powered by disguise.
“Saco's integration was meticulously planned out, and we managed to deliver an absolutely extreme 29628 vertical pixels,” explains Nils Porrmann, Director at dandelion + burdock. “The size of this undertaking only becomes clear at the site itself. With the bottom-most pixel at 210 feet from the ground even extremely long photographic lenses would only give us a moderate resolution to debug the installation and verify each pixel. It has been a great honour for our studio to work on the creative workflow of the tallest building on earth, and we have unspeakable respect for the installation team we worked with,” concludes Nils.
Six custom multimedia shows were created by SACO Media Collective as part of the Burj Khalifa daily content. It was important that the visual content related to the building and its architecture, impressing visitors by presenting visual effects to trick the eye and enable the architecture to take on a ‘second skin.’ Whether with colours, lighting effects or 3D deformation, the content was never flat to the surface and used the building’s curves and depth as its canvas.
“For the actual content production pipeline, two different templates were created in Adobe After Effects to allow content to fit perfectly our system specifications, SACO’s technology and the building architecture,” explains Marie-Christine Dufort, Creative Director with SACO Media Collective. “Even though the building is really tall and the accurate pixel count was enormous, the templates were easy to use and helped create any type of content very efficiently. A simple 3D model was also used for 3D and architectural effects and animation.”
The templates were not only created for the team’s use but also to produce the technical specifications and guidelines for any content creation for Burj Khalifa’s new screen. “Emaar and the Burj Khalifa team wanted the possibility of presenting their own content in the future as well as giving an opportunity to young creators to present work of their own through an open call,” Marie-Christine says.
With offices in London, Hong Kong, LA, New York, and Shanghai, disguisedisguise works with some of the world’s most talented visual designers working For more information visit: https://www.disguise.one/
