Formidable Queen frontman Freddie Mercury took to the stage in the form of tribute performer Michael Kluch and his band in September, for a huge concert at Prague's 18,000-capacity O2 Arena. The group, named Queenie, played the "Queen Relived" show with a rock 'n' roll lighting design and a mix of pre-made and live feed visuals driven by Hippotizer Boreal+ and Karst+ Media servers.
The three-nighter, big budget production took more than a year to plan and program, with the staging and tech taking 16 trucks to transport. Renowned show designer and creative Martin Hruška staged an impressive display of pyrotechnics and lighting pizazz, backed by a huge upstage LED screen. The visuals depicted images of Mercury, played by Kluch, on stage. Lighting designer Lukáš Patzenhauer was in charge of the visuals, controlling the Hippotizer Boreal+ and Karst+ Media Servers via his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M console.
"I fell in love with Hippotizer," said Patzenhauer, who has worked with some of Czechia's biggest music and TV stars. "It's such a user-friendly platform, enabling me to harness the power of VideoMapper, effects and masks to create incredible visuals via DMX control from my desk, matching the colors often to complement my lighting design. The Timeline feature in Hippotizer V4 allowed me to playback the show simply, despite a complex array of visuals and effects."
The Hippotizer Media Servers were supplied to the production by Prague-based distributor LightNeq, and their Hippotizer specialist Karel Bartak, who assisted Patzenhauer during show setup and programming.
Hruška, who designed the visuals, added: "Some of the video content was created in other programs, such as Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects and others. Some songs were manufactured in the form of livecam and color corrections and effects adjusted within Hippotizer. Hippotizer gave us reliability, speed and great synchronization with the lighting. It's a really great product."
The production team were also supported by Green Hippo's Central Europe Sales Manager Evzen Zomer. "The team were really impressed by the Boreal+ and Karst+ Media Servers, and ZooKeeper," says Zomer. "Both Martin Hruška and Lukáš Patzenhauer used many of Hippotizer V4's powerful features, including a creative use of LED blocks using VideoMapper which optimized output use, reducing the number of LED processors needed to drive the content to the screens, which looked fantastic."
The three-nights of shows, which had been delayed due to the pandemic, were so successful that the production is now gearing up for international dates.
