Endangered Species Take Over Empire State Building
A filmmaker is bringing attention to the plight of rare animals by projecting their images onto Manhattan鈥檚 most famous skyscraper.
Every night, the Empire State Building changes its famous lights to honor sports teams, holidays, and marketing promos, like The Simpsons Movie in 2007. This Saturday, endangered species got their turn on the building鈥檚 iconic facade, courtesy of Oscar-winning filmmaker Louie Psihoyos, whose environmental documentary comes out this fall.
Using 40 stacked projectors on the roof of a nearby building, Psihoyos and a creative technology studio, Obscura Digital, illuminated the south face of the Empire State Building from 9 p.m. to midnight on Saturday night with static images and videos of rare animals. Snow leopards and golden lion tamarins were featured alongside many species of birds, whose portraits were provided by Joel Sartore.
As the , this is the first time that the Empire State Building has been turned into a canvas for moving images. The show, three years in the making, even included a King Kong-like ape scampering up to the 71st floor, with real helicopters circling overhead.
Psihoyos, who previously directed The Cove, which won an Oscar for exposing the brutalities of Japan鈥檚 dolphin hunts, says the goal is to help inspire a global movement to prevent a sixth mass extinction. In 2014, Stuart Pimm, conservation chair at Duke University, who is featured in Racing Extinction and who attended Saturday鈥檚 viewing party, on how current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than what they should be. But he thinks that the movie鈥檚 positive tone could be effective. 鈥淚t鈥檚 saying things are bad, but it鈥檚 also saying, hey, there are things we can do,鈥 Pimm tells 爆料公社. 鈥淲e do not have to eat shark fin soup, we don鈥檛 have to eat illegal sashimi, we can . . . empower people in Colombia, and Brazil and Ecuador and Madagascar to look after their own biodiversity.鈥