In support of her eighth studio album ‘ANTI’, the tour began on 12th May 2016 in Jacksonville, trotting all over the world through various US & Europe stadiums and will be making its final stop on 27th November 2016 in Dubai. The entire tour will span a total of 75 shows all over the world running through 7 months. Once again Green Hippo managed to speak to James Valpy, ‘The Hippo-tech’, who was the Media Server Engineer behind the successful tour. He managed to squeeze in a quick interview with us between his busy schedule and we got the chance to find out more about the shows! The shows were filled with explosions of light and sound, brilliant effects on a WinVision Air 9mm LED Monolith with custom mirror tint plates fuelled by a Hippotizer V3 HD Genlock x8 as Rihanna showed off her stellar vocals. Hippotizer V3 was used for content playback, timecoded content playback, adding FX to IMAG.
James said:
We used Hippotizer because it was the right tool for the job and we were able to do multiple output configurations across many of our Hippotizer V3 servers. The design was so fluid at the start of rehearsals we needed to be as flexible as possible and having a number of existing Hippotizer machines helped us distribute the workload as we worked through the final requirements of the show.
The setup consisted of 8 x Hippotizers on racks in video world, 4 Mains and 4 Backup, using Pan Mode, Dual Mode and Single Mode with Datapath x4 to power the stage. It was a complicated show for the crew to maintain for such a long time but they managed to pull it off and fans loved it.
James also added:
For shows of this size reliability is paramount. We used Hippotizers because in the right hands it guarantees every show will be 100%.
In addition to Rihanna’s ANTI tour James also worked behind the scenes of CL, Imagine Dragons, and Zayn for eighteentwentysix, a company that puts together brilliant department crews of people that he respects because of their work ethic and attitude towards life in the industry. While working for eighteentwentysix James also made his debut as Video Crew Chief at a KYGO show in LA. There is no doubt that things are taking off for James and we’re excited to see what incredible productions he will be part of next!
Credits:
Creative Director: Willo Perron Lighting Designer: Jesse Blevins Lighting & Hippo Programming/ Touring LD: Joshua Koffman Video Crew Chief: Ian Haywood Lead Projectionist: Curtis Miller Lead LED: Karl Hansen Media Server Engineer: James Valpy