The Opening Ceremony for the games was held in the newly built Olympic Stadium on 12 June. During a two-hour spectacular event, produced by Dimitris Papaioannou, the Olympic Stadium was transformed into a magical stage of artistry and performance, enchanting the audience, as well as viewers around the world with Azerbaijani's history and culture. There were highlights from poems by Poet Nizami, pomegranate symbolism, traditional mugham chant and rotating and emerging sceneries featured by 300 performers.
Green Hippo played a part in this historic event. At the beginning of the opening ceremony, showing the dry cracked earth, the creative director wanted to have five different types of grass emerging and growing.
Each bundle of grass or flower was mounted to a stepper motor that would push it vertically through the floor. The motors were DMX controlled utilising 16 bit channels to enable extra smooth movements. Each motor was mapped individually to a pixel location on the screen and when it turned white the motor would push the grass out, when black it would recede back into the stage. This enabled the creative team to create a video clip of spreading white to control the growth of the plants.
The real challenge of this project arose from the need to be able to make the grass grow slowly at a controllable speed however all grass needed to be triggered according to their location on stage as to follow the performer and leaving the growing greenery behind her. This was achieved by creating a special pixel based effect that allowed detailed control of the "growth-curve" - how fast a pixel turned from black to white. The team could set various points in the curve and control the speed and also the final extend of each motor.
To create the final effect the five different types of grass were mapped, each capable of growing at different speeds and at different times. Hippotizer's layers and masks were utilised to achieve the grouping of different types.
(Jim Evans)
