Green Hippo HippoCrittter on Simian Mobile Disco European Tour

Producers and re-mixers Jas Shaw and James Ford have been making a name for themselves as Simian Mobile Disco for the past six years. The DJ duo from London produce mostly analog, techno, dance, and electro house music and have released various albums since 2005 with their own music and a range of remixes.

This summer sees them touring Europe and the UK to perform at numerous festivals including Rockness, Scotland, and Pohoda, Slovakia.

Working on their production, accomplished lighting designer David Cohen SauceDesign created an inspired structure using 181 Barco 340mm MiStrip LED lights. Cohen arranged the MiStrips in eleven rows of four and five hexagons, fashioning a honeycomb-shaped LED rig that allows him to create an ingenious mix of shapes and sequences when running content over them.

Because the MiStrips are video-mapped hundreds of times and divided onto individual controllers on his lighting console, Cohen is able to run content either over the entire set-up or over selected strips or areas of the structure only. Essentially he is using the Green Hippo HippoCritter's VideoMapper feature to create DMX controllable masks.

Cohen uses Art-Net to connect his lighting console to the HippoCritter and the Hippotizer's embedded HippoNet network to control the HippoCritter from his MacBook Pro. All commands and signal are then sent via a Barco D320 image processing unit before reaching the MiStrip tubes. Using a MidiSport I/O box from one of the HippoCritter's USB ports the Hippotizer is connected to the backline.

For the gigs, Cohen uses pre-programmed cues to run content over the hexagonal MiStrip frame. A couple of video clips have been included, but using the Hippotizer's integrated generator function and a few simple colored (test card) images Dave created the majority of this astonishingly engaging and at times kaleidoscopic content.

Cohen is now in the running for a Knight of Illuminations award for his work on the tour.