Electric Forest Festival Ramps up Content With Hippotizer

ROTHBURY, MICHIGAN, JULY 31, 2025 ― Visual solutions company Observatory created ambitious new content for this year’s multi-genre Electric Forest festival in Michigan, using two Green Hippo 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, part owner of the festival — to create two new pieces of scenic content for the famous Sherwood Stage, which was hugely successful and the most popular choice by incoming artists.

Deploying the Boreal+ MK2 Media Servers, 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 5mm LED Proscenium ‘Header,’ two IMAG screen and upstage LED at 7mm, 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 Hippotizers ran without a hitch, which is incredible given that this was one of the hottest years I’ve spent at Electric Forest,” says Harris. “The Boreal+ MK2 Media Servers did a fantastic job of maintaining smooth playback of content across the huge LED canvas. On one occasion, I received guest content very late but was able to download and transcode 20gb of content in a 45-minute changeover. It was also then synced to the backup via the 10gb 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 32bit, giving us more color information and 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 real-time.”

“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 complement the guest VJ/LD looks on stage. I also used Hippotizer’s X-Fade engine to smoothly transition between colors to keep everything looking seamless. It’s a really efficient way of creating more flexible content, which would otherwise only have been possible using a real-time render engine, such as TouchDesigner or Unreal Engine.”

Sherwood Court featured sets by UK artists Sub Focus, Nia Archives and Hamdi, as well as U.S. electronic acts Mersiv, Louis the Child and Jade Cicada.

The Electric Forest festival was held at the Double JJ Resort in Rothbury, Michigan. 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. Green Hippo’s Hippotizer Media Servers are distributed by ACT Entertainment in North America.