Green Hippo

Jodrell Bank Calling - Transmission 001

Jodrell Bank Calling - Transmission 001

“Once again Hippotizer played its role beautifully. It never fails to deliver what we need across a wide range of applications we throw at it.”, remarked Digital Insanity’s Richard Bagshaw after completing the first ever Transmission 001 event at Jodrell Bank.

The festival took place on Saturday 2nd July at the new Jodrell Bank Discovery centre in Cheshire and saw a crowd of 5000 turn up to enjoy the music, headlined by the Flaming Lips, and a 3-minute projection piece on the Lovell Telescope, especially created for this pilot festival, which was to be highlight of the night.

There are plans for six 5000+ capacity events to take place at this site in 2012 when the telescope celebrates its 50th birthday.

For the projection six 20K Christie projectors where mounted on top of a 4-story scaffold tower behind the FOH control tent and the content was managed and fed to them from one primary Hippotizer HD: “For the playback of the video we chose the Hippotizer HD (our video playback tool of choice), as with its flexibility and built-in warping tools it allowed us to compensate perfectly for the dishes curved surface.”

The telescope presented a 1.3 acres canvas and production company ‘Ear to the Ground’ commissioned Digital Insanity to design some bespoke content to suit the event as well as its location. Collecting material from various sources, including Dr. Tim O’Brien, astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank, Digital Insanity created a unique piece:

“We used imagery of Bernard Lovell, the man behind the construction of the dish, made of point sprites so he looked like data itself. The zooming data was actually an animated hexadecimal representation of Sir Bernard’s voice; strobing imagery of information sent out on the voyager space probe and schematics of the dish overlaid on the moon, was also included. For the ‘Hello Moon’ section (as the hello moon sample was actually Sir Bernard’s voice being bounced off the moon itself) we use imagery of the construction of the original dish (kindly supplied by Dr Tim O’Brien) along with actual pictures of the data collected by the telescope.”

Throughout the festival the telescope remained facing the sky and observing Pulsars continuously, only to be rotated towards the excited crowds and giving everyone an astonishing sense of its scale, when no other than the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne introduced the highlight of the event. Once it had completed its stint as first intergalactic canvas, control at the Lovell telescope returned it to probe into space.

Richard comments that: “Hearing the appreciation from the crowd as the clip was being played made all the late nights and long days of preproduction worth every second.”

Jodrell Bank’s website states that “Even now it remains one of the biggest and most powerful radio telescopes in the world, spending most of its time investigating cosmic phenomena which were undreamed of when it was conceived.” And here at Green Hippo we are thrilled to have been part of this inaugural event.