SignWeb | signweb.com

Acclaim LEDs were incorporated in the upgraded and expanded casino.

The former Cherokee Casino Resort, an established Cherokee Indian-operated casino in Tulsa, OK, teamed up with the Hard Rock Casino for an upgrade and expansion. The facility has been re-branded as a Hard Rock franchise.
Still owned and operated by Cherokee Nation, the casino wanted a facelift that preserved its Cherokee-inspired heritage but also assimilated Hard Rock’s design elements.
A large, plastic light sculpture hangs over seven banks of slot machines in the casino’s 125,000-sq.-ft. gaming area. Designed with a Native American motif, with seven elongated, feather-like points, the massive sculpture comprises a black metal frame that contains pieces of various-colored plastic, lit by fluorescent tubes from inside. Hard Rock designer Warwick Stone said, “The (Cherokee) chief liked it,” even though the color scheme didn’t mesh with typical Hard Rock décor, so the sculpture stayed.
Thanks to help from David Brecheen of Production Essentials LLC (Edmond, OK) and Acclaim Lighting (Los Angeles) LEDs, Stone added color-changing pieces that blended in with Hard Rock’s design elements, while preserving the fixture’s Cherokee-inspired heritage. To achieve the color-changing effect, he incorporated Acclaim X-Cube Pro RGB LED fixtures, which replaced the fluorescent light source inside the sculpture. Additionally, a thin frosted, Plexiglas acrylic replaced the colored plastic.
The creative vision for the project came from an unlikely source: a giant squid. Stone said, “I had just watched a documentary on sea creatures, and there are these huge humboldt squids that do a mating dance,” said Stone. “When there’s a female, their skin flashes like iridescent lighting and waves of color ripple through them. And I thought, I want to do that – make light wash through the fixture, rather than just changing colors flatly. I had just used an Acclaim color-changing LED floodlight on a restaurant project, and I was really happy with the power and the color of it.”
Stone contacted Acclaim, which suggested using their X-Cube Pro for the project. The X-Cube Pro is a compact, LED fixture with RGB color mixing and linkable, DC power and data. Its 4.9 x 1.3 in. footprint makes it suitable for tight spaces and linear LED runs.
Acclaim also put Stone in touch with Brecheen of Production Essentials, their Tulsa-area dealer/installer. A total of 196 X-Cubes were installed in the sculpture. “We did it in two 12-hour days,” said Brecheen. “The nice part was that we didn’t have to do any wire terminations, because the X-Cubes have their own cable leads. They just screw together.”
The X-Cubes are controlled by Compu PC-based lighting control software from Acclaim’s sister company, Elation Professional. Each X-Cube is addressed individually, with a total of 588 DMX channels being used (three channels per unit for RGB).