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WELCOME TO THE 10TH EDITION OF THE EUROVISION DIARY!
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Happy April Fool’s Day! You may or may not find a prank or two on this page so keep an eye out!
So here we go again…. For those of you new to the Diary, we report on the daily activities leading up to the Eurovision Song Contest with regards to the lighting, staging, video, sound, pyro and God knows what else. This year is the 61st ESC and if you’ve never heard of Eurovision, you can learn more than you need from our friends at eurovision.tv.
We usually tell you what we did the day before so don’t get confused! If things are super crazy we may fall a day behind but we always manage to catch up. And hey, if you’re ever bored, you can read the diaries from 2009 (Moscow), 2010 (Oslo) and 2013 (Malmö). Just go to the M & M home page and look under References. The menu at the right runs in order backwards from the top down, with the most recent on top. If you have questions or comments, you can share on our facebook group “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” We have to approve posts, but that’s only because last summer a bunch of people started posting porn and fake Ray-Ban ads (thank you Marian Sandberg for the heads up on that!)
Anyway, we’ll be loading in to The Globe on Monday, April 4, so I wanted to take a few days to share what we’ve been doing so far, because we’ve been working on this project since August!
Every year when I’m involved, I really try to push the creative team to try new grounds, to do the unexpected, and be bold enough to do stuff that has never been done before. Needles to say, the creative team is always on board with this! So, how do you do the new and unexpected? Well…….. using brand new technology that has not been used before is the easy way out! Having that said, me and our lighting designer, Fredrik Jönsson took a plane to a remote island outside the mainland of Europe. It’s a strange place, where they drive on the wrong side of the street, and claim that steak and kidney pie is really good! For those of you that are still interested of going there after hearing these shocking things, the country is United Kingdom, and the city we chose to go to was London. We went there to visit the PLASA show, and oh my, it’s actually not in London at all…………
Anyway…………. we had 5 days on this island on a river that has not seen a living fish since 1743, outside of London. Great five days indeed with lots of meetings, and finding several potential toys that could take this show to the next level!
Next stop was Las Vegas and the LDI show. We stayed at the Hard Rock hotel, and the pool bar service was horrible, and everyone working there was butt-ugly…………
But we finally found a place that served decent apple juice, and Fredrik smiled again.
We had an idea of mounting moving lights on a helicopter and flying it around the venue during the grand finale of our show
So, one helicopter ride was ordered and off we went!
Experiment failed completely becuase we ran out of gas and had to land in a big pit in the middle of nowhere. Lucky for us, the local Indian tribe had both chips and champagne, so we could tolerate it.
Back in Vegas, we thought it would be a great idea to see what happened if you took a Clay Paky Hepikos, took it to the top of a skyscraper and turned it on. Turned out that we woke up half the hotel 500 meters away…………SORRY!
Work hard-eat good. And what would be more obvious to order than a lobster when you are in the middle of a desert!? We had a great week in Vegas, and we DID actually visit the tradeshow floor every day. All and all, we found a LOT of fun things during these two trips, and you’ll see several of them put to use in our show within the next couple of weeks. But for now, I’ll ask you this, since we are in some sort of ocean theme here at the end of todays update: What do sea monsters eat?????? FISH & SHIPS!
Until tomorrow…………..
