An abandoned Romanian casino long past its prime is infused with new life in the form of thousands of colorful glitter bombs in this striking ad by Sony for its range of BRAVIA 4K HDR televisions. The whole thing was shot in 4K, capturing every little piece of glitter as it explodes out of popping balloons packed floor-to-ceiling inside the aging structure. Over 4,000 balloons and 3,300 pounds of glitter were used to create the ad.

Onlookers began to gather outside the casino on the day of the shoot, drawn by the strange sight of all those white balloons stacked up inside the elegant arched windows. In the film, a single balloon begins tumbling through the space until it’s almost entirely filled with them.

As you can probably imagine, it would have been hard for a photographer to hit the trigger fast enough to capture the action at just the right milliseconds – but they found a clever way around that. High-speed photographer Fabian Hefner attached a noise sensor to his camera shutter so it triggered every time a balloon popped.

Sony commissioned singer-songwriter Tom Odell to re-record the Cyndi Lauper song ‘True Colors’ for the ad, which will be released as a single on September 30th. Watching the whole video is definitely worth a few minutes of your time, just for the satisfaction of seeing glitter spew absolutely everywhere – in 4K, if your connection allows.

At these 10 abandoned casinos, the high rollers are laying low, the cards are all jokers, the wheel’s stopped spinning and the dice have all thrown snake eyes.

Penthouse Adriatic Club Casino, Croatia

(images via: Photography Jiriparizek, Yugoslavia Virtual Museum, The Basement Geographer and Geocaching)

The Penthouse Adriatic Club casino was the centerpiece (or should we say “centerfold”) of the Haludovo Palace Hotel, located on the Croatian island of Krk. Opened with great fanfare in 1972, the casino was the brainchild of Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione who invested a cool $45 million in the project. Perhaps he should have stuck to ventures of the soft-focus and soft-core nature.

(image via: kaskero de Viaje)

Rumor has it the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his family vacationed at the hotel/casino at least once – his return flight to Baghdad was delayed because one of his sons forgot his gun under the pillow in his room. Good times!

(images via: Tomislav Mavrovic and kaskero de viaje)

In any case, factors including the rise of the internet and the Yugoslavian Civil War conspired to constrict the Penthouse Adriatic Club casino to the point where it was closed, neglected, used to house war refugees and finally abandoned.

The Overlook Hotel’s Casino

(image via: Niki Feijen)

“Overlook,” as in The Shining? That’s Niki Feijen’s story and he’s sticking to it. Feijen’s spectacular photos of The Overlook Hotel posted to his photostream include the one above, purportedly depicting its 12-years-abandoned casino. Black Jack was here, and blackjack was played here.

The Big Easy Casino Boat

(images via: Pop Up City and Gaming Floor)

Name regardless, nothing’s been easy for The Big Easy casino boat. The 238-foot long New Orleans-themed ship was built around a 30,000-square-foot casino boasting 23 gaming tables. One wonders if the wind and waves would affect the motions of the roulette wheel, the dice  or the slot machines… actually the question is moot because The Big Easy has spent much of its life unoccupied, dodging hurricanes, docked at various Florida ports.

(image via: Traveling Around)

Delayed by bureaucracy first, ferocious weather second and Chapter 11, er, eleventh, The Big Easy has been a sad story of fading dreams and fading paint, the latter unattractively accented by dust, rust and debris. It seems that banking on a floating casino in a region prone to devastating storms may have been just too much of a (removes sunglasses)… gamble. Yeaaah!!

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All Bets Are Off 10 Crapped Out Abandoned Casinos

Vegas is a strange and sometimes-seedy speck of civilization with virtually nothing nearby of note … save perhaps the massive Hoover Dam and its associated geology, that is.

And what better way to contrast something new with the horizontal strip and its upward-spiking tower … than via an upside-down vertical endeavor, like this thesis project by Stephan Sobl?

This dazzling inverted design features a “lightweight carbon-fibre structure” that “would be suspended from a concrete cantilever and supported by a spiralling metal shell.” The result is a sort of half-exposed skeletal tension system – a building, one could say, in mid-strip.

If it seems over-the-top (or edge, as it were), that may be true, but is also fitting for the context – in Las Vegas, the only way to get attention is by grabbing it away from what is already there (you don’t have to tell that to those running establishments in the old downtown). In a way, it is very Darwinian, and only the flashiest survive.

And of course, it would not be Vegas if you could not access the structure both on foot and by car, and if it did not house a casino, hotel, boxing ring, concert hall and all the other standard amenities of a local resort.