Blue Man Group goes Hippotizer

It has already been a while since "Blue Man Group goes Hippotizer", but I didn't have much time to blog about it.

The following passages are copy-pasted from the November 2006 issue of Lighting & Design America:

Scharff Weisberg, which programmed Blue Man Group's last tour and served as design consultants and system engineers for the sit-down shows, furnished How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.0 with three Green Hippo HD players, an iLite 6XP LED wall, Olite 510 LED strip displays, two Christie Roadster S+16 projectors, and a complement of Sony cameras.

The reconceived show marked a move from a Medialon controlled Doremi video playback system to the Hippotizer HD media-server system. "This was a big thing for us," says Glaab. "We'd used servers before with mixed results. But working with Scharff Weisberg and using a system made for video made a huge difference -- the results were amazing. The Hippotizer HDs really made the process of making changes to the show and tweaking cues more streamlined than ever before. Merging the video cues into the grandMA lighting board and having the board operator handle all of the cues also made for a smoother, more efficient process."

"Using the Hippotizer HDs as the front end of the system optimized the content acquisition process" points out Scharff Weisberg project manager John Ackerman. "And combining video and lighting cues in one board without using a separate show control system and operator has tightened up the look of the show and created a more elegant system. The video in a Blue Man Group show is immersive; it's more than just magnifying the staging of a song. It's much more integrated."

[...]

Sean Cagney, Scharff Weisberg's programmer for the show, was challenged by "all the scrolling text" in the content. "It is the most brutal type of video, as it saws against the vertical refresh of video," he explains. Cagney used his technical acumen to overcome the jittery nature of the scrolling text; some cues in the show have four such files played back simultaneously while running at near double speed pulling well over 100 megabytes per second off the RAID system in the Hippotizers. "The machines didn't even bat an eye," Cagney reports.

[...]

Joe Volpe is Scharff Weisberg's assistant project manager for the tour. Dan Bolland is the lighting designer for the tour and Patrick Brannon his programmer; the video road crew includes lead tech/crew chief Sean Kelly, projectionist/cameraman John David Williams, and Hippotizer tech Brandon Oosterhoff.