Green Hippo on Eurovision 2012

Battling it out for Europe's highest vote, Green Hippo's Hippotizers were at the core in pulling off a spectacular show at the Eurovision 2012 song contest held in May.

Eurovision, known for its epic, weird, and remarkable performances didn't fail to entertain once again as contestants competed, not just with their voices but the effects, lighting, and imagery that supported them. This year Europe's guilty pleasure came back bigger and better, with a huge stage, catwalk, six giant LED screens, and an enormous lighting rig.

Held in Baku, Azerbaijan, Eurovision 2012 was the biggest yet with 42 countries entering and 26 making it to the grand finale. With each country representing their own style and culture, classic Eurovision was brought into each performance, using colors and imagery that ran through the screens and the LED stage floor accompanied by lighting and pyrotechnics. Hippotizer's PixelMapper and VideoMapper components took each performance out into the seating area, bringing the whole 'land of fire' theme into the hall.

Crystal Hall holds up to 20,000 people and the event was witnessed by 125 million people worldwide. The huge LED screens created an immersive environment for the performances; using all of Hippotizer's features to bring the set alive.

This year's winner Sweden, with their song "Euphoria" by Loreen, made full use of Hippotizer's PixelMapper.

A month prior to the finals, production of the visuals commenced. Event engineers together with Nick Charalampidis, product specialist from Green Hippo, began set-up and programming of the system alongside writing some new features to support the huge task ahead of them.

This year the content resolution was really pushed for LED screens with 4000 x 3000 pixels being used; a few customizations back at Green Hippo headquarters along with the outputs of six active Hippotizer HDs genlocked together made this possible. Being monitored by multiple Zookeepers all aspects of the show could be controlled remotely around the vast Crystal Hall.

Hippotizer product manager Lee House said, "Eurovision is always a jewel in the crown of any manufacture in our industry. We are very pleased to have been selected as the main provider for the visual playback. Although the UK's vocal entry finished second to last I think we may have proven that Hippotizer was the UK's real winning entry this year."