Originating from the US, Electric Daisy Carnival made its second trip to the UK this July, transforming Milton Keynes’s outdoor National Bowl into a 28 million pixel entertainment spectacle.
Aside from the music, the video production delivered a spectacular environment with LED screens surrounding all 360 degrees of the national bowl and with weird and wonderful performers and the combination of LED light displays, pyrotechnics and lasers, it was clear that Electric Fly wanted to make the event just as visually appealing as the music itself.
Musically, this year’s EDC delivered a diverse line up of producers. Avicii’s 80 minute headline set brought the show to a close and as the sky became pitch black, the Electric Daisy Carnival came into its prime.
The epic showdown of pixels started with Electric Fly, and the creative team of Nick Jevons and Philip Winward of Electric Fly, creating the concept and design for the festival. James Baker of Creative Video Design was then brought in by Jevons to head up the visual solutions, driven by Hippotizer media servers.
Using this design, Xpono custom made certain content using a complex set of After Effects templates supplied by Creative Video Design. Xpono’s content was rendered for the Hippotizer’s which then distributed the 3.6tb of data through the HippoNet network.
All the main stage and wing screens, supplied by VER, were Winvision Air 9mm with the 360 degree perimeter being made up of Big Bear 25mm, Everbrighten 15mm and Winvision 12mm and 8mm. The use of one type of screen would have been more suitable but due to the sheer scale of the design and quantity of screens needed for this production there simply wasn’t enough of any one type of screen in the world available.
To map both the custom content and the visiting VJ’s to the screens, Creative Video Design used over 36 different VideoMapper maps and DMX2 components with six GenLock HDs with quad HD-SDI running in dual mode to the active system and another six as running backup. All servers were controlled by Baker’s full size grandMA2 console with a grandMA2 Lite in session.
An additional Genlock was added to the set-up, used as the main media manager and also gave us the ability to check all incoming VJ signals.
The Hippotizer GrassHopper also featured in the visual set up with one being used for Baker’s dual output ZooKeeper and a Hippotizer HD and GrassHopper used by the House VJ, Green Hippo’s very own Nigel Sadler.
“From any point of view this was an epic setup from start to finish, even just trying to see the screen was a challenge because it was so big, and to think that we were able to VJ in real time across its surface is amazing, the system performed flawlessly without the slightest hitch,’ says Sadler.
Creative Video Design were happy to be a part of this impressive project helping bridge the gap between Electric Fly and VER (screen suppliers) from complicated After Effects templates to system design for all aspects of the show.
“On a show of this scale, everything is big. We have lots of servers, pixels, led panels, crew, and points of rigging. Managing the process was rather a challenge. This is one of the most complex shows we have worked on in terms of pre-planning.
The detail within our templates really pushed the limits of After Effects, but thankfully with VideoMapper we were able to take rendering time down to a minimum. With around 200 layers running within the system, it performed faultlessly.
