Rothbury, MI, USA – Deep in the woods of the Double JJ Resort, more than 40,000 people spent four days under the glow of Sherwood Court, the stage that has become Electric Forest’s visual signature. Every set played out across a scenic canvas more than 7,000 pixels wide — lighting, lasers and video fused into a single environment, all driven by Hippotizer Media Servers from Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment brand.
Behind that canvas stands content and creative studio Observatory, which has spent the past five years — more than a third of the festival’s fourteen-year run — building Sherwood Court’s distinctive identity, for Leisure Expert Group and Insomniac Events. In doing so, they’ve been solving one of festival production’s trickiest diplomatic problems: how to give every visiting artist their own show without ever letting the stage stop looking like Sherwood Court.
“Artist VJs are often slightly concerned about another operator becoming part of their show,” says Simon Harris, Technical Director at Observatory. “But they quickly see that I’m there to enhance the audience experience while keeping the stage aesthetic on brand. The biggest challenge is always trying to complement the incoming artist production while retaining the festival and Sherwood Court aesthetic. Having a wealth of creative FX at my fingertips allows me to quickly match colors and manipulate the content to complement the artist’s production.”
That approach pays off. “Incoming artists and their teams seemed to be much more accepting of the scenic content being part of their show,” Harris explains. “It really became an extension of the overall performance rather than something sitting alongside it.”
On stage, the team deployed a 5mm LED proscenium ‘header’, two IMAG screens and an upstage 7mm LED wall, for a full canvas of 7056 x 2864 pixels. The Hippotizer Media Servers were supplied by Screenworks as part of the wider video systems deployed across Sherwood Court, Ranch Arena and Tripolee, powering Observatory’s scenic canvas while also feeding artist content to the upstage wall whenever visiting productions did not travel with their own video operator.
Observatory creates its scenic content as a single unified canvas, then uses Hippotizer’s Output Manager and VideoMapper to map the visuals precisely across the stage architecture. Live operation combines a Stream Deck XL, two MIDI controllers and a bespoke TouchOSC interface running on an iPad, all tied together through Hippotizer’s MultiController functionality.
“We control the show from multiple devices,” says Harris.
“Hippotizer gives us the flexibility to trigger scenic looks, adjust color correction, apply visual effects and make live creative changes from whichever controller is most appropriate.”
That continuity extends year to year. “I’m able to import last year’s show file, add any additional content and carry on where I left off,” Harris explains. “Even importing our content backup of around 160GB takes only a matter of minutes.”
Reliability held throughout: despite driving the large-format scenic canvas alongside artist content, the Hippotizer systems ran the full four-day event without requiring technical support — leaving Observatory’s team free to focus entirely on the audience experience.
Alongside Harris, the production team included Stage Manager Jason Merder, Video Project Manager and Crew Chief Jeff Smith, and Video Engineers Bilal Mahmood and Nate Brister.
By the festival’s close, Sherwood Court had once again provided the backdrop for memorable performances from Sammy Virji, Madeon, Shpongle and LSDREAM — each one unmistakably the artist’s own, and every one unmistakably Sherwood Court. Festival reviews praised the atmosphere and production values across the event, with Sherwood Court continuing to be recognized as one of Electric Forest’s defining experiences.
Credit: © Alive Coverage for Electric Forest
