Green Hippo

Cellcom Volume Festival - Jerusalem, Israel (April 2011)

Cellcom Volume Festival - Jerusalem, Israel (April 2011)

This April 2011 saw a first in festivals. The Cellcom Volume Festival, an interactive social media event, had the entire audience logging on from home via their webcams to watch 11 concerts over a period of 5 days.

This was an innovative concept launched by Israel’s biggest mobile company Cellcom, who also arranged a YouTube takeover created by McCann Erickson Israel.

The artists, including some of Israel’s best-known performers such as Mercedes Band, Monica Sex and Moshe Peretz, performed in a studio especially set-up for this live internet music festival.

The large background screen of 40m x 3m / 5120 x 384 pixels curved around the stage and via their webcams the audience’s feeds were placed on this screen. The webcam’s live feed was send to a computer outputting from 5x5 to 2x2 grids which were fed into a Videomatrix 16x16 and controlled via Pathcontroller.
 

In total three Hippotizer Stage media servers and one HippoPortamus using software version 3.0.14 found their way onto this ingenious event.

The three Stage media servers each had a 4-channel-composite-input card plus 1 default composite input card installed and they were all running on 12 layers.

Two Hippotizer Stage units where sending the video-matrixed webcam feeds via 4 outputs of UberPan to the large LED background screen, while the third Stage controlled 8 LCD screens which were hung in front of the LED wall. These displayed messages from the webcam-viewing public, giving the performers a chance to react to those messages in real-time.

This unconventional set-up allowed for communication between the performers and the audience with the artists being able to respond to questions and even song requests.

The HippoPortamus was running ZooKeeper and Virtual Media Manager, controlling the two Stages that were outputting UberPan to the LED wall, and at the same time outputting content to the circular semi-transparent LED screen attached to the truss above stage.

Israel’s Screenlight provided the LED screens and Hippotizers. Shay Bonder did an amazing job in programming the Hippotizers and also designed some custom video content to go with the live camera feeds. He commented that: “I don’t think another system could have done it.”

Our Hippotizers have been used on many a festival before, so we are doubly delighted they are the first media server to be used on the very first live interactive internet festival.