Green Hippo Ensures that Lady Antebellum Looks Good

	Lady Antebellum. Photo: Todd Kaplan.

Lady Antebellum, with support from Kelsea Ballerini, is a formidable world tour offering. And, SRae Productions with the help of Clear All Visuals was the team tasked with ensuring that the video and lighting lived up to the performers' expectations. Matt Geasy of Clear All Visuals specified two separate setups, each with a pair of Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal Media Servers. Both setups were used to feed the LED screens and each one was triggered depending on the performer, switching between two or three outputs.

During the global event, the SRae team ran Hippotizer in conjunction with an automation system. The Kinesys motor control system fed PSN data to the servers, so that they could live-track the screen positions in real-time. The end result was the content tracking of the screens as they moved throughout the show -- a really smart effect!

For Lady Antebellum's automated screens, the system provided information regarding the vertical position of the two motors for each truss. This was a unique challenge but using MacroManager, they were able to interject formulas between the automation data and SHAPE. This allowed them to take the vertical position of each motor and the horizontal distance between them to calculate the vertical position and rotation of each truss at over 60 times per second. This was vital as the team needed to know the resultant height and rotation of each truss in order to get the content to track across the screens as they moved through the "virtual canvas."

This also allowed them to build in variables for the touring crew to adapt to changes in rigging setups for different venues -- meaning that no matter the rigging limitations in a venue, they didn't have to sacrifice any part of the show. Even in venues where they were unable to fully utilize the automation system and had to rely on static truss positions, the content was able to track across the screens perfectly without and reprogramming of the servers.

Sooner Routhier of SRae Productions described how the team employed the color block system during the tour: for Kelsea Ballerini, Hippotizer's color block system was used to map the VER blades in the set and for Lady Antebellum they used color block to get better control of each LED title. SRae traced the screens to give them the look of being lined in modern, neon-esk lines. They were also able to use each LED tile as a lighting fixture, taking a bit of pressure off the content team. Sooner also added that she was "THRILLED" (her capitals) with Green Hippo's tech support from the US office. "It was really easy to get someone on the phone the instant we needed help with anything at all."

Green Hippo's flexibility and reliability again came to the fore, and the Boreal units confidently dealt with everything thrown at them. Asked for one of the highlights when using Hippotizer Media Servers on the Lady Antebellum gigs, Geasy of Clear All Visuals said: "I really enjoyed the CSV implementation!"