Dancing with the Stars debuts in 3D at Westfield WTC
Tens of thousands of commuters and shoppers bustling through Westfield World Trade Center this week are seeing Dancing with the Stars’ Julianne Hough and Alfonso Ribeiro rumba like they never have before.
The show’s co-hosts are two-stepping and bunny-hopping across a 100-yard-long digital ballroom to promote the 32nd season of the show, and their spinning, flipping, and dipping jumps out at passersby in 3D.
The crowd-stopping display that spans all 22 screens in Westfield’s WTC’s Oculus was produced in anamorphic video by URWs media & experiential team and the award-winning immersive agency Coffee.
“A lot of the work went into matching the color of the tiles in the video with the color of the tiles surrounding the screen and making sure the grouting in the video tiles aligned perfectly with the real tiles,” said Coffee’s project manager Owen Fearon. “As people are walking toward a 3D image, the image is going to look different, and we have to make sure the backgrounds are the same.”
It takes meshing the world of CGI—computer graphics interface—with the world of brick-and-mortar to get people to believe they actually just saw Ms. Hough pirouette outside the Apple Store.
“It’s about replicating an environment that looks real and it’s not. That’s what CGI does,” said Coffee managing director Al Silvestri. “It allows you to peel back and look inside that wall and mix the two worlds together.”
What may seem not so real to people exiting their PATH trains and heading to their Wall Street investment houses and law firms is taking a sip of their Joe Coffee, lifting their heads, and having their eyes pierced by stabs of light from a large, gleaming, 3D mirrorball.
“The 100-yard screen at the Oculus is the perfect place for brands to engage consumers in a highly dynamic way in the biggest media market in the U.S.,” claims Colin Shaughnessy, executive VP and director of U.S. sales for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.
The Dancing with the Stars campaign ends its run at Westfield WTC on Oct. 8.