Hippotizer delivers magic for Electric Forest festival

Michigan’s beloved multi-genre Electric Forest festival ramped up its AV offering this year, with the monumental Sherwood Court stage’s proscenium arch LED screen displaying content powered by tvONE’s Green Hippo brand of Hippotizer Media Servers.

Visual solutions company Observatory, which has been providing scenic visual content and delivery/VJ services for Electric Forest’s Sherwood Court Stage since 2022, were brought on board by Leisure Expert Group – the Creative Directors of Insomniac who part own the festival. Observatory’s Simon Harris and his team worked closely with Leisure Expert Group, transforming their visual brief into animated visual content. 

To realize the visual delivery, they specified two Green Hippo Hippotizer V4 Tierra+ MK2 Media Servers, provided by Screenworks NEP, with set up assisted by Ashley Hazlett. “We used an array of Hippotizer components including MediaManager, MultiController, VideoMapper, and PresetManager for this project, knowing that the video content needed to be displayed throughout the four-day festival,” explains Harris. “I made speed and color changes to the scenic content as required, whilst also triggering Hippotizer FX for the LED proscenium arch.

“The servers behaved flawlessly throughout the event and were able to playback content smoothly throughout. This can present its challenges where I have two 7K mixes to cover the proscenium arch LED screen, and an extra HD mix I use for VJing artist supplied content on the US LED wall when an operator is not present.” 

The main content themes for the Sherwood Court stage revolved around nature, focusing on trees, water, jungle, vines, butterflies, and the famous Sherwood elephant, many of which within an overarching 

stained-glass aesthetic.  “We prepare a deck of the scenic content which is shared with incoming artists so they can choose what and how it is displayed during their performance,” Harris continues. “For all content I relied on MultiController, giving my control devices access to the engine and PresetManager to recall pre-programmed FX, colors and preset mixes that use multiple layers to create the overall composition. I have a custom TouchOSC interface running on an iPad Pro, that allows me to first select one or multiple layers with an X-fade time before recalling color presets with seamless transitions. Hippotizer provided great flexibility and stability throughout.”

Among the standout performances on the Sherwood Court stage this year were CloZee and LSDREAM, G Jones, Maddy O’Neal, Chase & Status and many others. The stage has become iconic for the festival since its integration with the scenic LED screens back in 2022. It also occupies a beautiful space on-site next to the forest, attracting a large audience throughout. It also gets plenty of airtime with drone shots shared on social media.