APRIL 5

WELCOME TO THE 10TH EDITION OF THE EUROVISION DIARY!

APRIL 5

Yo Yo!
Welcome to our second day in the largest spheric buidling in the world. Things are going more or less according to the plan, and we are even ahead of schedule in some areas. So far, so good, but the weather is not amazing………….

Some people have more class than others! One of our lighting techs, Stefan Sjöland is not one of them, but you have to hand it to him, he has a COOL t-shirt. Stubbs is a legendary BBQ joint in my second home town, Austin. They are not as famous for their BBQ as they are for their BBQ sauce, which you can actually buy in most food stores here in Sweden. They are also world famous for their backyard, where many of the greatest bands of all times have played. I’ve seen Motörhead there twice, a band that Stefan was the LD for more than 10 years.

We built up the SL and SR upstage dimmer areas today. It’s quite funny that we still call them dimmer areas, even though we don’t have a single dimmer channel in the entire rig………It’s hard to teach an old dog how to sit nice…………..

Now the lighting crew just has to connect some thousand-odd cables, and we’ll be ready to go!

We got our Cyberhoists in today. As I said a couple of days ago, we are using the brand new Generation II. We have 78 active units in the show. 8 of them our doing automation for stuff coming in and out of the stage floor. We’ll tell you more about that once we get it to work 🙂

Most of them are hung directly off the mothergrid. The ones in this picture are all for our moving arcs above the stage.

We also started to load in all cable trusses today, so they can be rigged and moved out of the way. Every single piece of truss in this show is black.

Floor is getting crowded. Due to the fact that we are doing a show in a hockey arena, we have a very limited amount of space in the loading dock area and inside the venue, so the transport schedule has been VERY carefully planned, so we don’t clog up.

And if we DO clog up, we will yell at this guy! Meet Erik Blomdahl, our logistics and load in manager. Unless it’s in his schedule, it will NOT happen.

Our two mothergrids are almost ready and will go up to trim tomorrow afternoon. We have a total of 290 rigging points, so there is still some stuff left to do for Mr.D and his crew.

I was about to end today’s update with a joke about my penis, but it’s too long………….