Hippotizer Transforms Illustrations Into Layered Worlds

Illustrations, projection and lighting converge at the Finnish National Theatre in a new staging of the children's favourite Puluboi and Poni, with Hippotizer Media Servers from Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment company, at the heart of the visuals.

Lighting and video designer Ville Virtanen turns the book’s artwork into a living stage environment, running both lighting and video from a single grandMA console. By manipulating discrete elements of the illustrations within Hippotizer alongside his lighting cues, he achieves a unified workflow.

Virtanen developed the show’s look with illustrator Emmi Jormalainen, blending imagery from the original books with newly created art. He animated the material in Adobe After Effects, interweaving motion sequences with stills.

Content is rear‑projected onto a near stage‑width anthracite screen from Showtex using an Epson EB‑L3000U fitted with an ELPX03 lens. Rather than treating each illustration as a finished plate, Virtanen splits assets across multiple Hippotizer layers so individual objects can be moved, recoloured and effected independently.

"The biggest advantage is definitely the layering system," explained Virtanen. "I'm using twelve layers, and the illustrations have been divided across several of them. At a minimum, there is a background color layer and a main image layer. In addition, some songs contain multiple individual objects that have their own movement, color changes, or effects programmed directly within Hippotizer."

The system runs a single viewport and mix with simple keystone mapping for the rear‑projection surface. The grandMA's Hippotizer library provides control of the media server via the MANet protocol, with primary parameters including position, scale, playback speed and direction, colour adjustments, opacity and mixer modes.

"Because I operate the show myself, it feels both natural and efficient to control the media server from the same console that controls the lighting," said Virtanen. "All parameters follow the same logic and workflow. Put simply, a projector is like a moving light fixture with an unlimited number of gobos and visual capabilities. Thinking of it this way makes it very intuitive to integrate video into the lighting system."

This integrated approach allowed Virtanen to programme everything into a single sequence, so almost every lighting cue is mirrored by a corresponding video change.

One sequence morphs a cityscape into a street scene: the sky and buildings shift colour as stars and the moon appear, while the street moves forward to suggest the audience is travelling through it. Lighting changes track the video’s rhythm and direction to support the storytelling.

Time pressure meant the entire concert was built using presets for position, zoom, focus and colour, with colour presets ensuring a consistent palette between video and lighting across the production.

Previsualisation proved vital. The theatre’s 3D model of the main stage, accurate to around 10 centimetres, was used with Hippotizer Prep and Capture’s visualisation tools so Virtanen could programme almost the entire concert in advance.

With only one day available on stage before the first concert, most elements were prepared ahead of time, leaving the venue session for fine‑tuning and preset updates. Although the theatre’s visualisation studio has been in use for four years, this marked the first time Virtanen had programmed a production almost end‑to‑end before entering the venue.

green-hippo.com