LONDON – Green Hippo’s Mercedes Stevao-Boase and Stefanie Mueller made their way to Elstree Studios at the end of January 2015 and spoke with “HippoExpert” Russell Grubiak.
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Green Hippo has always placed a great importance on creating good relationships with our clients and support them with their needs when designing, programming or operating shows. Part of this means we love to hear about all the projects our friends and users work on and we are always thrilled to see our products at work.
To catch up with a long-standing client and friend, Green Hippo’s Mercedes Stevao-Boase and Stefanie Mueller made their way to Elstree Studios at the end of January 2015.
The latest Celebrity Big Brother season had reached its halfway point and we went to meet up with our loyal HippoExpert Russ Grubiak.
Russ is a Lighting and video programmer specializing in TV and he has been involved in a long list of TV shows over the years, yet he is not one to shout about his hard work or the number of shows he works on.
Coming from a theatre background, Russ has been working mainly in TV for several years and is one of maybe a dozen Programmers / Designers who are regularly involved in Broadcast & TV. In recent years Russ has worked on shows such as Family Fortunes, Jonathan Ross, The Royal Variety Show, Stand up for Cancer and Big Brother with some of his machines being hired out on shows. He also regularly works in conjunction with colleagues such as Little Mouse Production’s Bill Peachment.
With the recent release of the brand new Hippotizer V4 product range, Russ was one of the first UK programmers in the industry to get his hands on two pristine Hippotizer V4 Karst units.
Currently his equipment includes 3x Hippotizer V3 GrassHoppers and 2x Hippotizer V3 HD plus the latest additions of the 2x V4 Karsts, which saw one of their first outings being loaned to Digital Insanity for the world premier of “Kingsman – The Secret Service”.
Additionally, Russ uses a range of other equipment on a regular basis such as his Vector Compulite and Hog 4 consoles from which he controls most of his shows. With his ‘fluency’ on Hippotizer and any auxiliary gear, Russ creates versatile and visually striking set-ups to cope with all his clients demands.
This last season, saw him concentrating on X-Factor, ‘Take me out’, the Royal Variety Performance, ‘8 out of 10 cats’ and ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ plus works with designers Oli Richards, Dave Davey, Nigel Catmur, Gurdip Mahal, and Chris Rigby.
ITV’s dating game show “Take Me Out” has been broadcast for seven seasons so far and the show, hosted by comedian Paddy McGuinness, uses plenty of lighting and video cues throughout. Not just for design purposes but equally as part of the competition. For the program Russ uses two Hippotizer HD units and a total of 4 outputs. Hippotizer’s VideoMapper and PixelMapper components both come into action, with VideoMapper running the majority of the set-up. The Hippotizer servers control the 15mm screen at the top of the stairs with video chases running up the staircase. Additionally the LED above the female contestants, 2 large screens at the back and the strip of PixLED F30 LEDs behind them are all controlled by Hippotizer.
On Channel 4’s “8 out of 10 Cats”, a comedy panel show, Russ uses one Art-Net universe from a Hippotizer GrassHopper to control the RGB ChromaQs behind and amongst the panelists and the video output to send backgrounds behind the panel.
And most recently, with the current season having just seen Katie Price crowned winner of this year’s competition, Russ has been working on Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother. Utilizing everything from MiTRIX tiles on the front of the Big Brother House to MiStrip and PixLED F30 LED fixtures running along the catwalk, up the stairs, and around the ‘eye’ stage door, Russ controls all the content from one Hippotizer GrassHopper output.
The MiTRIX tiles were used to create a large LED wall on the front of the building, including the door area. These displayed not only the background content and ‘picture-framed’ live feeds, creating a fairy-tale theme for the show, but also the countdown on the entry-doors of the house. Russ fed the content from his GrassHopper to the broadcasting truck who then place it in the picture frames or on the building front. A fiber run distributes content sent by Russ to the other LED fixtures, providing video chases running up the stairs and around the audience.
The content is partially created using Library stock content & some custom show graphics but with color and blending adjustments made by Russ in Hippotizer.
With an important part of the program being broadcast live, Russ needs to be able to make last minute changes without impacting the running of the show. He chooses to work with Hippotizer media servers particularly due to their flexibility, ease-of-use and the possibilities for the different set-ups on different projects.
Additionally with many hours working at weekends and evenings Russ appreciates Green Hippo’s Technical Support who have been there to help him at the last moment if needed.
Being excited about the new developments in Hippotizer V4 Russ comments: “I’m looking forward to having a proper play with my new Karst unit. V4 is bringing some exciting changes especially the flexibility of playing back 4K on the DisplayPort output as well as the two additional DVI outputs for larger HD content.”
Russ has already got projects lined-up for this year, including “Comic Relief”, where Hippotizer will control a large screen and LED cubes on stage, which might just give him a chance to test out those new V4 Karst units and we look forward to hearing all about that.
