Choice Hotels, in 2008, broke ground on a new chain called Cambria Suites. Their target market for this posh new hotel would be today’s modern jet-set of young professionals who expect high-tech amenities with their business accommodations. The Brooklyn Brothers devised a concept where hotel guests could borrow a camcorder from the front desk, shoot some off-the-cuff, often off-the-wall, video and then upload it to roomforyourimagination.com for the world to see. The design theme would be a never-ending hotel hallway where the visitor would virtually open each door to check out the myriad of guest videos. Visitors can rate, comment and send the videos to their friends.

Brooklyn Brothers supplied brilliant HD video tours of actual Cambria Suite rooms. We then created motion graphic effects to bridge the transition between a composited hallway and a plasma screen in the room where we would overlay the Flash video. A unique requirement was giving the guests the ability to upload their prepared video in the format from the camcorder and process it on the server for viewing in Flash.

For quality control, Cambria needed the ability to manage all guest videos and approve them to go live on roomforyourimagination.com. Go Media, specializing in open-source PHP development on Apache, took advantage of M Encoder to process all the various video formats into Flash Video. We then built a custom admin queue to manage all the uploads for approval, sorting, deleting and editing text details. Cambria could sort the videos, manage comments and even upload or download video sources all in the administrative portal.