Hail to the Digital Screen!
A series of high-performance LED tiles featuring a video tribute to Americana welcomes visitors to the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The George W. Bush Presidential Center on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas, Texas, is divvied up into two parts: (1.) an exhibit about George W. Bush and his presidency, and (2.) Freedom Hall, which serves the National Archives and the Presidential Library. At the entrance to Freedom Hall, a new, photo-realistic LED display welcomes visitors with an interactive show, “The People,” a 360-degree exploration celebrating the diversity and beauty of the land, its people, and the connected nature of all Americans. The eight-minute experience was conceived by Artist David Niles and produced by Niles Creative Group (www.nilescreativegroup.com), a “soup-to-nuts” production company in New York City and Palm Beach, Florida. Continuous imagery wraps the foyer’s upper walls on a specialized, high-performance version of Barco LiveDots C5 LED display tiles, comprising four individual 50-by-21 foot surfaces that are mounted with 90-degree corner joints to form a 360-degree, 220-by-21-foot seamless video screen installed twenty-seven feet in the air. Niles Creative Group designed, built, and installed an innovative, automatic media-and-content delivery system that delivers the experience on this display more than thirty-two times daily. Broadcast-style intelligent redundancy ensures “fail proof,” “hands free” operation at all times. Niles became involved in this project back in 2008, after Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Foundation, contacted him after seeing the content work he’d created for The Comcast Experience at the Comcast Center in
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Philadelphia. Niles initially developed the idea of creating a “living mural” for this centerpiece. “That developed into a solid concept over several months’ time but had to wait for the construction of the building to be realized,” he says. During initial conversations, there was no display technology that could handle the steep 70- to 75-degree viewing angle without distortion. But last year, Niles partnered with Barco to create a new LED design unique to the library—a daylight-viewable, photo-realistic display that’s completely uniform when viewed from any point in the hall. Niles was allowed access to film inside the Oval Office and at Camp David during 2008. For the more recently filmed “Textures” segment at the beginning of the experience, he set up four DSLR cameras in order to achieve a very challenging, high-resolution, 360-degree-view timelapse presentation. “When you’re time-lapsing four independent cameras at the same time, every single frame on each camera has to be slightly different than the other ones,” he explained. “So each frame had to be specially treated to make it smooth and seamless.” “The People” then evolves into a tapestry of the land, its people, and the capital, set to an original composition performed by a sixty-five-piece orchestra. The finale incorporates a surprise that makes viewers part of the experience. “There are thousands of people inspired and moved by this experience every day,” says Niles, “and that’s something we take special pride in.”
February 2014 // Sign Builder Illustrated
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