Let It Glow: Team Creates Holiday Sights for Light Show

The University of Texas at Dallas' 3D Studio LightSquad is giving the more than 2 million viewers of the Dallas night skyline a gift of holiday light animations across the 23-story LED facade of the Omni Dallas Hotel.

The 12 Days of Christmas LED light display, produced by undergraduate and graduate students in Andrew Scott's 3D Studio, will feature a new animation nightly through Christmas Eve. It is the fourth project that Scott's students have created for the Omni's iconic exterior, which features 4 miles of multicolored LED lights.

A special viewing of all 12 videos for the students and their invited guests will take place on Dec. 18 at 5:45 p.m.

The LightSquad kicked off the holiday season in November with a digital tree-lighting ceremony for the Omni's Ice, Lights & City Nights multiweek event. A festive, five-minute video looped overhead as guests ice-skated on a rink the hotel had built for the holiday season.

"The Omni is one of the largest canvases for displaying art in Dallas," said Scott, an associate professor of arts, technology, and emerging communication (ATEC) in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. "There are very few places in Dallas where you're going to get a larger audience for your work. On any given night, millions of people will see it."

Scott said an artist's first public art project is the hardest to secure, which is what drives him to foster opportunities like working with the Omni and with Ruth Andrews BS'20, content and public relations marketing manager at the hotel and a Naveen Jindal School of Management graduate, who has helped facilitate these unique light displays.

Scott is a classically trained sculpture artist whose evolving interests have led to the incorporation of light-projection technology in his teaching and in his work. The LightSquad was conceived as a way to combine these art forms and provide students with the chance to work on high-profile projects.

"It's important that our students get to present their work on this type of stage," Scott said. "It's a way to share their talents with the Dallas community and for UTD to have an impact well beyond campus.

"We're training the next generation of creative professionals. Students need to be capable of taking the creative and technical skills they learn at the Bass School and translating those skills in the real world."

As a teaching associate and an ATEC graduate student, Shaghayegh Ashouri was intrigued by the challenge of designing a large-scale public art project and joined the Omni project as a learning opportunity.

"It isn't like a gallery installation or a private commission," Ashouri said. "You have to be mindful of the pictorial itself when creating for a broad audience and think about technical challenges, like the colors you pick and a pedestrian audience's perception of the LED display versus an audience seeing the display from the highway."

After graduation, Briley Wehr, an ATEC junior, hopes to encourage people to engage with the world around them through interactive media installations. She said the Omni project was the perfect portfolio-building experience.

"I like the idea of making interactive media installations that foster people to come back to reality and interact with each other," Wehr said. "Because nowadays, everyone is on their phones and focused on themselves."

Scott considers his students' relationships with art, humanity and technology - or the "sweet spot," as he calls it - a necessity, and it's UTD's intersection of these three disciplines that attracted him to the University in 2014.

"I'm working with students so they can leverage and monetize the skills and abilities they've learned throughout their education," Scott said. "An understanding of technology is one thing, but an understanding of history, philosophy and psychology are the skills that give students the wealth of knowledge to tell stories in the modern era. It's important to be able to make associative connections between contemporary high-tech experiences and traditional high-touch experiences rooted in the humanities."

Scott said it's one of the best times to be a creative professional as there are multidisciplinary practices that didn't exist five years ago.

"We're training students for the jobs that don't exist and for the moments that haven't happened yet," he said. "Our students are going to be able to leverage their intelligence, skill and grit to meet the moments that the 21st-century economy demands."