For the welcome event of the annual Conventions & Incentives New Zealand (CINZ) conference, local visual production specialist TomTom Productions provided a cultural and historical storytelling experience with the help of Hippotizer Media Servers.
The presentation, highlighting the lesser-known cultural history of Queenstown and the story of Lake Wakatipu, used rich graphic content and soundscapes to relate the captivating story, which included traditional Maori legends of the origins of the lake and landscape.
TomTom’s Hamish Edh and his team collaborated with representatives from Destination Queenstown and leading New Zealand event design agency, Watson & Wyatt Events, to deliver the story content for the opening session.
TomTom specified two Hippotizer Karst Media Servers, one as the main playback unit, with the second as backup. The main Karst fed the visual content to a high-res (2.6mm pixel pitch) DB Series LED screen from VuePix which backed the conference stage. The content had been used on a previous event where it was played to a 6:1 ratio screen: for the CINZ show, however, the screen ratio was limited to 4:1, so Edh adapted the content to fit using Hippotizer’s Aspect Mode.
“We used the Hippotizer Karst as a media manager to store the content and to manage the playback and mapping,” explains Edh. “We triggered the clips externally from a lighting console, which also triggered the audio and lighting playback, keeping everything sync’d.”
He adds, “Hippotizer’s lighting console integration is awesome – far better than any of the other media servers we have in our stock. Hippo is always our go-to for playback when we’re integrating with lighting solutions. For us, having a solution that plays nice with lighting console is one of the big selling points for Hippo.”
Image: © Clare Toia-Bailey
