Green Hippo

Hippotizer and Bluman brave the elements to stage the Google Advent Calendar

Hippotizer and Bluman brave the elements to stage the Google Advent Calendar

In late November 2009 a team from Bluman Associates Ltd gathered on a cold dark winter’s night at the edge of a high building.  Business is good for Bluman so the last thing on their mind was jumping.  The first thing on their mind was the 2009 Google Advent Calendar which they were about to spend the next month projecting onto the side of Westfield’s shopping centre, London.  We caught up with Pod Bluman for a quick chat to find out the good and the bad about using Hippotizers to project and promote what is arguably the world’s most recognisable brand name this side of Coca Cola.

The installation is geared towards entertaining shoppers approaching the building whilst promoting Google’s Chrome Browser software. “Fortunately the designs and the preparation were done in the warm!” Pod relates.  “We worked with our client, Flourish, to test and prove the installation.  Once on the roof we had to position the projectors as far back as possible to use our chosen lenses so, as planned,  we built  several platforms to support the array of 20K Christie projectors and settled in for a cold few days of programming.  The projectors were oriented portrait style lying on their sides in cradles to overcome the environmental restrictions we identified at pre-production and also to use every available pixel of the projectors panel for maximum quality”

Programming was done using 2 customised Green Hippo HippoPortamus media servers owned by Bluman Associates.  Hippotizer has native support for Matrox Triple Head 2 Go display splitters and the laptop based servers allowed the team to feed all 6 projectors with synchronised High Definition media whilst having a more flexible element of portability and security during downtimes.  With Digital Insanity’s Richard Bagshaw coming in during the latter stages to fine tune elements the results were rather spectacular with large scale projections to the entire front of the shopping centre’s facade.

Content was supplied by Skyscraper and consisted of constant elements to run throughout December following an advent calendar theme and daily features dropped in at the beginning of each day’s schedule.  “What was great about the timeline functionality was that we could simply use media for December 1^st as a placeholder to program the initial daily timelines.  Once done, any subsequent media was dropped into the existing banks and folders with no reprogramming.  It was really simple and I’ve worked with Hippotizer software enough to know that it’s going to work flat out day after day with no issues. That’s something our crew appreciated to minimise ‘gloves-off’ time” jokes Pod. “The production area is covered to protect the equipment but this creates a wind-tunnel effect and it gets pretty cold up there....ask Ian who’s babysitting the job, he’s doing a fine job of putting the Bluman into our company name!”

The project runs throughout December (obviously!) at Westfield’s London premises.

See the Advent calendar in action:

For more information:

www.blumanassociates.com