Team GB returned to home soil from the Tokyo Olympics for a victory celebration at London’s SSE Wembley Arena with a music concert, dazzling pre-made content and performance footage driven by Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal+ media servers.
Artists including Rag ’n’ Bone Man, Laura Mvula and Nile Rodgers took to the stage to celebrate Team GB’s 65 medals at the Olympics, backed by an oval-shaped IMAG screen displaying colourful content made by motion design studio, Shop. The stars of Team GB were interviewed in front of a large invited audience of NHS frontline workers and National Lottery players.
Transition Video was approached by Keely Myers from Global Touring Office to deliver the visual aspects of the show, which was also broadcast by the BBC.
“We created a package of LED screens and media servers for the event, choosing to use two Hippotizer Boreal+ Media Servers with one feeding 4K to the main screen and another as backup,” explained Transition Video’s Rhodri Shaw. “We needed a powerful server that could deliver the visuals for an event of this size, and deal with the large amount of content for the multiple performers and the Olympics footage and the Boreal+ servers were spot on. The visuals looked incredible in both the stadium and on TV.”
“Ease of media management was key to this project being a success,” continued Transition Video’s Kate Perring, who co-programmed the media servers for the project and served as Screens Coordinator. “We had visual content from multiple sources and there was a lot of it, and Boreal+ enabled easier management of it all, including overlaid graphics. It worked seamlessly, and ZooKeeper made a fairly complicated programming situation much simpler.”
The Transition team collaborated with Green Hippo’s Special Projects and Strategic Product Director Nigel Sadler for programming and operation duties. Sadler used Hippotizer’s powerful Timeline to programme the intricate show, using it for playback to Timecode.
“The show was a mix of live acts, some timecoded, some operated on the fly, with live interviews and VT clips in between,” said Sadler. “I programmed the main part of the show on the Hippotizer Timeline making good use of the Crossfade engine within Hippotizer to take care of all the transitions. This makes it very easy and fast to alter if needed, up until the very last moment, as so often is needed for live TV.”
Perring continued: “Tim Maple, the musical director, was slightly nervous about the integration with Timecode, but he came to us at Transition Video, saw what we were doing with the Boreal+ servers and how if you happen to lose connection there’s something called Auto Freewheel, which means it carries on until it reconnects, and in five minutes he was satisfied and went away happy!”
The screen content was briefed by Screens Producer Louise Segal, who liaised across all departments to ensure the desired looks were broadcast.