Queenie frontman, Michael Kluch and his band took to the stage in September for a huge concert at Prague’s 18,000-capacity O2 Arena. The Queen tribute group performed the Queen Relived show with a rock ‘n’ roll lighting design and a mix of pre-made and live feed visual content driven by Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal+ and Karst+ media servers.
The three-nighter, big budget production took more than a year to plan and programme, with the staging and tech taking 16 trucks to transport. Show Designer, 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. Patzenhauer was in charge of the visuals, controlling 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 colours 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.”
Hippotizer media servers were supplied to the production by Prague-based distributor LightNeq, with Hippotizer specialist, Karel Bartak, assisting Patzenhauer during show setup and programming.
“Some of the video content was created in other programs, such as Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects and others,” Hruška, who designed the visuals, continued. “Some songs were manufactured in the form of livecam and colour corrections and effects adjusted within Hippotizer. Hippotizer gave us reliability, speed and great synchronisation with the lighting. It’s a really great product.”
The production team were also supported by Green Hippo Central Europe Sales Manager, Evzen Zomer. “The team were really impressed by the Boreal+ and Karst+ Media Servers, and ZooKeeper,” said 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 optimised 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, rocked the O2 Arena with the buzz and drama of Queen’s music and performance, reinterpreted by Queenie for the Queen Relived show. On the back of its success in Prague, the show is now gearing up for international dates.
