A heartwarming Christmas animation, To Leeds, With Love, is lighting up the façade of The Queens Hotel in Leeds, UK, through advanced projection mapping powered by tvONE’s Green Hippo Hippotizer Media Servers.
The projection, a reimagined version of The 12 Days of Christmas, features a cheeky gingerbread man on a festive mission to decorate the hotel for a holiday party. This year’s festive display is brought to the city by LeedsBID (Leeds Business Improvement District) and is set to attract thousands of viewers. In 2023, the projection mapping experience drew an estimated 200,000 attendees.
Two Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 Media Servers are driving the visuals across the historic hotel’s front, supported by seven Panasonic projectors—five RQ50K, one RQ25K, and one RZ21K, with a backup RQ50K stored off-site for emergencies. The projectors are positioned in two 7.5-meter-tall towers in Leeds’s City Square, facing the hotel. This marks the second consecutive year the projection mapping has been showcased at The Queens Hotel.
Pro Audio Systems (PAS) coordinated and supplied the technical aspects of the installation, with Motion Mapping providing the Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 Media Servers for the project. “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 also handled the installation of the projectors, networking, playback and control systems, and a substantial audio setup, ensuring the video systems were optimized for seamless projection on the building’s surface.
“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 creaters 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.”
Motion Mapping used Green Hippo’s SHAPE software to align the projectors and fine-tune the content projection. “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 daily until December 22, from 4:30 pm to 8:30 pm, with projections every 30 minutes. Written by Yorkshire screenwriter Lisa Holdsworth and narrated by actor Richard Armitage, the projection is a collaboration between LeedsBID, the creative studio Onionlab, Victoria Leeds, and Pro Audio Systems.
