Finnish rock star Lauri Tähkä is on a tour of his home county’s biggest venues with an inspired set design featuring visuals driven by Hippotizer Montane+ Media Servers.
The chart topping musician is wowing crowds at venues including Helsinki’s Bolt Arena, Seinäjoki OmaSp Stadium and the Nokia Arena in the city of Tampere.
Finnish design studio Visual45 was challenged with creating a standout show for Lauri Tähkä’s tour, based on the concept of a spiritual, temple experience. The company’s Mikko Linnavuori and Eero Helle have worked on visual design for Lauri Tähkä before, and understand his requirements for audience-pleasing visual production values to match his dynamic performance.
“Due to the style of the show, and the fact that the order of the songs can change as the artist sees fit, we needed a media server solution that would offer the ability to busk and push the parameters in real time to create a memorable, live show,” says Linnavuori. “We knew that Hippotizer’s well-known ease-of-use and powerful features would allow us to change the visual looks on the fly, producing a dynamic show artistically but keeping operating as simple as possible.”
Linnavuori chose to use two Hippotizer Montane+ servers, one live and one as backup. On stage were seven screens rigged in layers to resemble epic church windows, fronted with an iron grid to create texture and layers. Risers extended the look and space for Lauri Tähkä and his band to perform on. The total pixel resolution was 1600×832 pixels, allowing the team lots of space upon which to drive pre-shot artist images and stock footage and effects.
“The main idea was to create living background to every song,” adds Linnavuori. “The Montane+ made achieving big, dramatic looks simple but effective.”
Accompanying Visual45’s visual designers Eero Helle and Mikko Linnavuori were Heba Rinkinen on screen content, with the visuals operated by Saku Väänänen. Technical production was delivered by Creative Technology Finland.
The Lauri Tähkä tour continues across Finland through to July 2022.
Photo: © Mikko Linnavuori