Empire State Building hosted an amazing video display of 160 endangered animals such as snow leopard, manta ray, and a golden lion tamarin on Saturday. The light show that was being planned to light up the New York skyline had been covered by HNGN a few days before the event. This live video projection displayed on the 33-floor facade of the building aims to further raise awareness regarding the extinction of these animals, The Independent reported.
Louie Psihoyos, the brainchild of this one-of-a-kind stunt, has already won an Oscar for the documentary "The Cove" which highlights and questions dolphin hunting traditions practiced in Japan.
"We're set to lose half the species on the planet by the end of the century," Psihoyos said. One of the prominent images shown was of Cecil, the lion that was illegally hunted down by a Minnesota dentist in Zimbabwe this early July. "There's only 3,500 wild male lions out there. The gun lobby keeps them from being on the list but they are endangered," according to Psihoyos. "Cecil -- I mean what a -- at least there are other lions left. I've photographed some species where it's the last male of a species, like the Rabbs' Fringe-limbed tree frog," he added. As the projections were shown on the building, the song "One Candle" was playing, according to NBC New York.
One of the spectators, Iliana Marquez, a 60-year-old woman from New York, had a front-row seating of the stunt saying that it was "really incredible. ... So beautiful to see it on such a grand scale."
The images of these endangered animals were displayed on the building through 40, 20,000-lumen projectors that were mounted on the roof of the building on the opposite side of the Empire State. Funded by private donors and Psihoyos, the event cost more than $1 million, according to the New York Daily News.
Watch highlights of the projection below:
