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Peculiar Wood at the Brewery, London

Christmas 2010 saw a first in themed Christmas parties when the Brewery’s PorterTun room was turned into Peculiar Wood, where several of Green Hippo’s Hippotizers helped create stunning dinner entertainment and party ambience for a host of corporate Christmas events.

It’s been six months since Christmas and summer is now upon us. So it probably seems odd to talk about this in the middle of July. Well, there's no denying we've been very busy so all the amazing work done by customers and users over the winter months was shamefully neglected. However, better late than never and we feel that this project and the hard work that went into it, most certainly deserves a mention.

The venue was opened for corporate hire during the pre-Christmas season and the Brewery ECO’s producer Simon Lockwood wanted to offer a flexible system for different clients and events, creating a festive atmosphere with the story of Peculiar Wood as dinner entertainment and an after-dinner party with live music and a display of strikingly dynamic video content.

The ingenious design of the display surfaces around the venue enable the telling of the story of Peculiar Wood, a 1,5hrs animated film presenting the tale of Terry the Fox who travels from a city to Peculiar Wood where the animals party.

The content was filmed as black and white shadow puppetry, with actors as well as graphics, and created by ML Studio’s Video Designer Mark Logue. Using stills from the content they created gobos, while also projecting the content onto a long curved screen with a 14m straight middle section, a 2.5m curve either side and 1.5m straight tangent to the curve on both ends.

Using 3 Hippotizer HDs in dual mode to feed 6 Sanyo projectors, plus one Hippotizer HD as FOH ZooKeeper control, John Montague, Production Director and Video Programmer and Operator, ran the event each evening, with Lighting Designer Richard Bowles taking care of the lighting.

In order to project the content seamlessly onto the screen totalling 22m, John made use of various Hippotizer components. Using a beta version of Hippotizer 3.1 UberPan component John was able to soft-edge blend the content from the 6 projectors on the screen. He used 5 soft-edge blends and 10 FX engines to guarantee one smooth image running over the whole screen:

“Using software 3.1 as a Beta testing version – the client was aware of this and took it on board. The software worked very well throughout.”

James Heron from Green Hippo comments: “John is one of our most capable users and extremely experienced with Hippotizer media servers. In this instance we were perfectly happy for him to use a beta version of this new software component, as we were confident that he would be able to handle any unexpected issues and this proved to be correct. The results were outstanding!"
With each projector outputting at 1024x768, John projected the 4608x768 content onto the canvas with a total output size at 6144x768 and used the overlaps to compensate for the soft-edge blending, offering super smooth playback with multiple layers at high resolution.

He then used the ScreenWarp component to fit the soft-edge blended projection onto the curved areas of the screen. The entire show was programmed in TimeLine and the 1.5hrs of animated film, comprising of 23 individual pieces and loops, created by Mark Logue of ML Studios, were composited on the server.

A special challenge presented itself when it came down to do the content splitting and fitting the content onto a curved canvas, issues that Green Hippo’s Sean Westgate helped to pre-program prior to the events’ start. John Montague commented on handling the media in this project:

“Sean Westgate came to XL Video in Hemel, where we pre-programmed the show – and we worked through the new Virtual Media Manager to make the ‘chunk’ splitting operate with the show.

The projection curving was a challenge to blend in correctly –ScreenWarp on the servers made this possible as the projectors had no warping cards in them.

The ability of the Hippo to make ‘low res’ but aspect ratio correct versions of the full resolution content was especially useful during pre-programming, allowing ML Studio to design the layout without having to re render the entire show.

We imported the entire full resolution content into the Hippos as High Res Image Sequences – each file consisting of each frame individually numbered. The 14min ‘Warren’ scene was 21000 individual frames long. So Media handling needed to be sensitively done.”

The professional quality and flexibility of the production also caught the eye of production company ‘Experience’, who booked the venue one afternoon, December 15th, for an event organised by RBS. As another ‘Peculiar Wood’ Christmas Party was planned for the same night John and the crew had to be able to adjust the system to fit the afternoon’s requirements, while being able to go back to the evening’s entertainment swiftly before the evening show:

“They were producing an event for RBS in the same venue on the afternoon of the 15th – with our event in the evening of the same day. They saw the opportunity that having this system offers for visual strength and flexibility to present their client’s message.

We programmed a full widescreen event for them on the 14th, and then ran their event on the 15th. I can’t think of another widescreen system where this would be easily possible. The flexibility and inbuilt layers & FX of the Hippotizer are what made this event both possible and a standout day for RBS – with the evening event proceeding untouched.”

Once Terry the Fox and his friends had partied in Peculiar Wood and the with dinner over, John proceeded to run the evening’s projection to live music and the party continued as it did every night throughout December.