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Electric Forest festival ramps up content with Green Hippo’s Hippotizer Media Servers

Visual solutions company Observatory created new content for this year’s multi-genre Electric Forest festival at the Double JJ Resort in Rothbury, Michigan, using two Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2 Media Servers driving two 4k outputs each to deliver the spectacle.

Simon Harris and his team at Observatory were commissioned by Leisure Expert Group - the Creative Directors of Insomniac who part own the festival - to create two new pieces of scenic content for the Sherwood Stage. Deploying the Boreal+ MK2s, which were supplied by Screenworks, the Observatory team delivered control equipment, programming, operation and content for the festival, as well as scenic content.

On stage the team rigged a 5 mm LED proscenium “header”, two IMAG screen and upstage LED at 7 mm, with a full canvas size of 7056 x 2864. These displayed the bespoke content, live camera feed and artist-supplied VJ content, which was operated by Harris when there was no guest VJ. “The Boreal+ MK2s did a fantastic job of maintaining smooth playback of content across the huge LED canvas”, he says. “On one occasion, I received guest content very late, but was able to download and transcode 20 GB of content in a 45-minute changeover. It was also then sync’d to the backup via the 10 GB network card in minutes, which was all made possible by Hippotizer’s Media Manager, and a very fast FOH internet connection.”

Harris notes that on some occasions it was necessary to playback scenic content on the proscenium LED while also busking VJ content on the Upstage LED wall, which was all achieved from a single Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2. The control equipment working in tandem with the Hippotizers included a Traktor F1 MIDI controller, Custom Touch OSC app running on an Apple iPad Pro, and a FaderDox UC 4 MIDI controller.

“The standout moment for me this year was the two new scenic clips we created for the show”, Harris continues. “We recently updated our workflow to .exr, allowing us to process multiple passes efficiently and to process our content in 32-bit, giving us more color information, improving color depth and gradients in our rendering pipeline. Using multiple passes within the same render allows us to separate elements of the content into different layers that give the impression of controlling lighting in realtime.”

“The scene is rendered in layers, separating the background, light sources and light rays, to allow me as an operator to playback both clips in sync, and adjust lighting colors to match or compliment the guest VJ/LD looks on stage”, he furthers. “I also used Hippotizer’s X-Fade engine to transition between colors to keep everything looking seamless. It’s an efficient way of creating more flexible content, which would otherwise only have been possible using a realtime render engine such as TouchDesigner or Unreal Engine.”

Helping to deliver the festival were Sherwood Court Stage Manager Kat Harris, Sherwood Court Lighting Director Tiberious Benson, Sherwood Court Video Engineer Derek Glover from NEP Screenworks, and Electric Forest Video Production Manager Jeff Smith at NEP Screenworks.

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