Green Hippo at Huddersfield’s Festival of Light

The pre-programming for the event was done using the PixelMapper component on a Green Hippo HippoCritter

One of the biggest annual events in Huddersfield, the Festival of Light, once again made a great impression in 2010. The festival took place from 02nd – 05th December 2010, and alongside the main event in St George’s Square there were a wide range of fringe events taking place across the town. Part of the festival this year was ‘Light Trail’, an event that saw several of the towns landmarks illuminated, with the display commencing at 4pm every afternoon for the duration of the festival.

One of these illuminations took place at Huddersfield’s Media Centre with the help of a Green Hippo Hippotizer media server and PixelRange PixeLine fixtures.

Working on a freelance basis with TG Events’ Tim Garbutt, who was organising the festival for Kirklees Council, James Bawn, usually from AC Entertainment Technologies, was given the brief to design a temporary lighting installation illuminating the Media Centre and celebrating the launch of this year’s festival:

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do once I’d done the initial site visit. The building has a unique aluminium clad structure within the outer wall. This was a great opportunity to bring the building to life and highlight the modern architecture.” Said James.

He used 84x 1044 JTE PixeLine batons from PixelRange with 14 units on each of the building’s six levels. PixelRange, created in 2002 as part of James Thomas Engineering, manufactures an extensive range of LED fixtures for all kind of events. Placing the batons within the gantries of the building hid the fixtures from view while focusing them towards the inside allowed the light to bounce of the building’s inner aluminium walls, creating a much softer image with the fixtures high intensity colour LEDs.

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Originally the pre-programming for the event was done using the PixelMapper component on a Green Hippo HippoCritter.

James explaines: “Using PixelMapper was very simple and gave me a chance to pre-program most of the content before we arrived on site.”

For the actual event the content and presets were transferred across to one of HSL’s Hippotizer HDs. The content was based on Hippotizer stock content which was manipulated and edited to fit the building PixelMap using the on board effects engines, thus creating a range of different looks that ran across the building.

The project employed a total of 4536 DMX channels and James used several Luminex Gigaswitches and Luminex Ethernet to DMX boxes to convert the ArtNet signal into DMX.

The project employed a total of 4536 DMX channels and James used several Luminex Gigaswitches and Luminex Ethernet to DMX boxes to convert the ArtNet signal into DMX.

James comments: “I would like to thank Lee House (my colleague) from AC Entertainment Technologies’ Video Department for his assistance and also Tom Etra from Green Hippo for his on-site support.”

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