Green Hippo

The 44th Annual Super Bowl

The 44th Annual Super Bowl

The 44^th annual Super Bowl on 07^th February 2010 took place at the Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. The games are the tenth Super Bowl to be held in Miami and saw a face-off between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints, who won the NFL Championship 31 : 17.

The Super Bowl is famous for deciding the outcome of the US football season, but it also draws vast audiences and viewers for its innovative advertising as well as the hugely anticipated halftime show, which has become continuously more high profile over the past decades, featuring acts such as New Kids on the Block, Gloria Estefan, Patti LaBelle, Tony Bennett and even Michael Jackson.

Broadcast on the CBS network, the 2010 Super Bowl saw British rock band The Who perform during the half time show, treating an audience of almost 75,000 people and around 100 million viewers to a medley of their hits, including “Pinball Wizard”, “Baba O’Riley”, “Who are you”, “See Me, Feel Me”, “Won’t get fooled again”.

Working on the video and lighting of the show Hippotizer programmer Jason Rudolph used two Hippotizer HDs and one HippoCritter to create a visual spectacle for The Who’s performance. He set up two identical systems, one on the main stage, one in the rehearsal tent which also served as a backup for the actual live show.

The Stage was made up of three circles of Barco MiStrip LED fixtures, arranged at an angle to create the circular LED display.

As the crew only had 7 minutes to assemble the halftime performance stage this was split into two halves which were joined and connected in the middle. This meant that the stage ran of two Hippotizer feeds and the Hippotizer HD’s VideoMapper component enabled content to be run all around the stage.

Barco MiStrip LED fixtures can only be programmed in a sequential grid. In collaboration with XL Video, Jason managed to figure out a way to re-map the pixels using Green Hippo's VideoMapper component so that XL would be able to match the content to the angled circular LED display. He said: “The HD’s were using VideoMapper to make this happen, and without it, we couldn’t have pulled off this show given all the factors we were working with.”

Controlled from the lighting desk the Color Block LED fixtures placed in the lighting rig were driven and PixelMapped by the HippoCritter, creating an impressive look.

“The support I got from Green Hippo on this job is exactly why I use their equipment. Since this was really the first project of this size to be using VideoMapper, we ran into some issues along the way, but the response and the fixes came quick and got us through the project” surely referring to the great support provided by our own Tom Etra, who spent several hours programming part of the stage display and debugging the VideoMapper software which is currently in late Beta stage.

Photos courtesy of Jason Rudolph