Green Hippo Hippotizer at Jodrell Bank UK Observatory's "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 Richard Bagshaw, of the design firm Digital Insanity, after completing the first ever Transmission 001 event at Jodrell Bank, the famed UK Observatory. The festival took place on Saturday July 2 at the new Jodrell Bank Discovery Center in Cheshire and saw a crowd of 5,000 turn up to enjoy the music, headlined by the Flaming Lips, and a three-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 four-story scaffold tower behind the front-of-control control tent and the content was managed and fed to them from one primary Green Hippo 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-acre canvas; the production company Ear to the Ground commissioned Digital Insanity to design some custom 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."

Bagshaw says, "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."