Shortly before a hotel opens, a building is finished and incomplete at the same time. Rooms, lobby and public areas are ready, but the people and the movement that normally define a hotel are still missing.
Two productions in the archive sit exactly one step apart in that phase, and together they tell the story of the transition.
The immaculate state
For the opening teaser of the Meliá Frankfurt City the rooms could be filmed in an immaculate state. Empty floors allowed calm camera moves and clean perspectives. At the same time, movement had to stand in for the life that was not there yet.
An empty house forgives very little. Without guests every crooked cushion edge shows, and without operation there is no accident to rescue a frame. The sequence is therefore planned closely: the order of the rooms, the position of the daylight, time for corrections between two setups.
The day the people arrive
The Premier Inn opening showed the next phase: staff, speeches, conversations and applause turned the new building into a social place.
Photographically that changes everything. Planned setups become reportage, and controlled light becomes whatever the room offers on that particular afternoon. The two productions therefore complete each other into one story about the move from finished interior to real operation.
What is left of an opening
An opening production does not only document a state. It usually creates the first pictures through which a new house is seen in public: on its own website, in the booking portals, in the local press and in the material prepared for corporate clients.
That is why it is worth planning both phases rather than one. The empty rooms age slowly and stay usable for years, while the pictures of the opening day exist only on that one day. More on this under interior and hotel photography.
