Green Hippo

The Special Olympics World Summer Games - Athens, Greece 2011

The Special Olympics World Summer Games - Athens, Greece 2011

The Special Olympics is the world's largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, providing year-round training and competitions to more than 3.1 million athletes in 175 countries. Alternating between summer and winter, the Special Olympics World Games are held every two years. Often the Games are the largest sporting event to take place in the world during that year. There are also local, national and regional competitions in over 175 countries worldwide.

This year the Special Olympics took place between June 24th and July 4th in Athens, Greece. Organizers welcomed over 7500 athletes, with around 40,000 coaches, supporters, and spectators pouring into the Athens area for the Games. 

As many of you know, our own Nick ‘the Greek’ Charalampidis (known to close friends and associates as ‘NTG’) took a 3 month secondment from Green Hippo and went over to Greece for this special event. He worked as server technician for Neil Trenell from Fix8Group who was the Programmer for the games. Fix8Group provided all video control, 8 Hippotizer HD i7’s, 2x MA2 Lites, 20 channels of DVI multi viewers and all switching and matrix for the screens and projectors. While PRG was the main contractor for the opening and closing shows, supplying Lighting and Video.

When asked why Neil chose to use Hippotizer Media servers he said:

“We used the Hippotizers mainly for the fact they are networkable. With the challenge of the obscure 3D Objects it was important that we had a flexible network solution for programming, Line Up and Playback. Hippotizer was our first choice. We used Live Mask heavily to enable us to mask our projection. The system worked seamlessly for the 6 weeks we were onsite. The flexibility the Hippotizer can offer really helped when we were tweaking content in the last few days of programming reducing the render time for the creative team.”

Hippotizer media servers were used to run all the shows LED screens and a pair of special flying objects that were projected onto. As this show was for international TV, a complete backup system was also in place. All the Hippotizer servers were run in dual mode giving 16 outputs. They were controlled from an MA2 Lite in the control position 300m away.

The Hippotizer media servers were all housed in an air conditioned room backstage to keep them cool in the midday Greek sun. Content was provided by the shows own creative team, with Neil and Nick heavily involved and contributing.

“NTG was the best tech I could ask for :) we drank lots of Raki and fed and watered the 'Hippos' Daily”

CREDITS:

Special Olympics Athens 2011

Director: Fokas Evangelinos

Set Designer/Art Director: Ilias Ledakis http://www.blonde.gr/

Lighting Designer: Ollie Olma http://www.mo2.de/home.php

Costumes Designer: Ellie Georgakopoulou

Photos by: Production Team Special Olympics 2011 & Scott Willsallen