Hippotizer Media Servers from Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment brand, powered the scenic canvas at Sherwood Court, the signature stage at Electric Forest, a four-day US music festival held at the Double JJ Resort in Rothbury, Michigan, attended by more than 40,000 people.
The display combined a 5mm LED proscenium header, two IMAG screens and an upstage 7mm LED wall for a full canvas of 7056 x 2864 pixels. The systems were supplied by Screenworks as part of the wider video deployment across Sherwood Court, Ranch Arena and Tripolee.
Content and creative studio Observatory, which has built Sherwood Court’s visual identity over the past five years for Leisure Expert Group and Insomniac Events, creates its scenic content as a single unified canvas before using Hippotizer’s Output Manager and VideoMapper to map visuals precisely across the stage architecture. The Hippotizer systems also fed artist content to the upstage wall whenever visiting productions arrived without their own video operator.
Live operation combined a Stream Deck XL, two MIDI controllers and a bespoke TouchOSC interface running on an iPad, tied together through Hippotizer’s MultiController functionality, allowing the team to trigger scenic looks, adjust colour correction and apply visual effects from multiple devices simultaneously.
Simon Harris, technical director at Observatory, said: “Having a wealth of creative FX at my fingertips allows me to quickly match colors and manipulate the content to complement the artist’s production. I’m able to import last year’s show file, add any additional content and carry on where I left off. Even importing our content backup of around 160GB takes only a matter of minutes.”
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