Kaleidoscope in the Forest — Observatory's Scenic Visual Content for Electric Forest

Michigan's Electric Forest is one of the most distinctive music festivals in North America — a multi-genre celebration of EDM, jam bands, dubstep and everything in between, set within a literal forest in the heart of the state. Since 2022, Observatory has been the scenic visual content partner for the festival's Sherwood Court Stage, the monumental proscenium arch LED centrepiece of the event.

The full 2024 story is covered in this TPi feature: Observatory Powers Electric Forest Visuals with Hippotizer (August 2024). Our 2022 debut on the festival is documented in detail by ETNow here (July 2022).

The Brief: Sherwood Elephant Stained Glass and Beyond

Observatory was brought on board by Leisure Expert Group — the Creative Directors of Insomniac who part own the festival. The brief was characteristically rich in detail. "Their initial brief was to focus on the Sherwood Elephant stained glass styling, which was the main content used throughout the day. In the evening and into the night we introduced more diverse themes including an art nouveau greenhouse structure, lush trees, growing flowers, animated branches and vegetation, natural kaleidoscopes, growing roots, waterfalls and graphic patterns," Simon Harris explained.

"Creative briefs from Leisure Expert Group are second to none as their attention to detail and overarching themes are crystal clear," Harris added. For a studio that thrives on creative rigour, that quality of brief is genuinely enabling.

The Technical Architecture

The Sherwood Court stage's LED canvas in 2022 was a massive 7056 x 2864 pixel canvas made up of 180m² of Roe MC7 and 150m² of YesTech MG7 LED. Observatory's content was powered by Green Hippo Hippotizer Tierra+ MK2 media servers — one main, one backup — supplied by Screenworks NEP. All content was created in Cinema4D, Octane and Redshift and sequenced in Adobe After Effects and Premiere.

One of the 2022 festival's technical highlights was Simon Harris's first use of Hippotizer's MediaManager sync across a 10GB network. "Synchronising more than 200GB of show content and then updating the servers when guest visuals were added throughout the weekend was seamless and seriously quick," he noted.

A Recurring Relationship, a Growing Body of Work

What began in 2022 has grown into a sustained creative partnership with Electric Forest and Insomniac — one that has seen Observatory return each year to develop new content for the Sherwood Court stage. The brief evolves, the themes shift, the technical setup advances. But the core of what we're doing remains the same: creating scenic visual worlds that feel genuinely part of the festival's identity, not just wallpaper behind the acts.

Sources: TPi Magazine (August 2024); ETNow (July 2022). LED supply: Screenworks NEP. Media servers: tvONE / Green Hippo Hippotizer.