MAY 10
WELCOME TO THE 10TH EDITION OF THE EUROVISION DIARY!
MAY 10
Yesterday feels like 2 days…..many ups and downs but ended with a fantastic broadcast!
My day started with a trip over to LLB, a Scandinavian lighting & sound trade show.
Me and Fredrik did a one hour Q&A at ESC Land, the exhibition booth that we have on the show floor for our technical partners. Then it was time for the first ever Bullen Awards where we handed out awards to these two fine nominees. Lifetime Acheivment Award to Björn Lehnberg and Visionary Award to Eric Holmberg! So proud over this prize and hopefully this will now be a part of our industry on a yearly basis! Much love to all that made this happen, Bullen’s family, Saskia and the kids. Bullen’s sister Erika Lagerbielke who designed the fantastic crystal prize. Fredrik Jönsson for coming up with the idea together with me and Linnea Nivvan who made it all happen, and finally Christer Björkman, our Contest Producer and good friend of Bullen who was the moderator of the ceremony. Finally a BIG THANK YOU to our sponsors, Barco, ETC and LLB for all the help!
And thanks to all who came to share this special moment. So many mixed emotions of joy, sadness and just complete emotional black out.
Let’s make this even bigger next year! #bullenawards
Then it was about time to rush back to the Globe for dress rehearsal 3 and the Semi 1 broadcast. Congratulations to the 10 Finalists:
Here they are in the order they were announced:
Azerbaijan!
Russia!
The Netherlands!
Hungary!
Croatia!
Austria!
Armenia!
Czech Republic!
Cyprus!
and Malta!
Very funny surprise at the beginning when Måns and Petra said “Welcome Europe” and Europe (the band) started playing “Final Countdown.” OK, it wasn’t Europe the real band – these guys have performed around Sweden for years and are very talented and looked just like them! You know, my friend Niclas used to tell girls I was the keyboard player for Europe. Of course this only worked in America (well……Vegas).
The interval act in semifinal one featured “The Grey People” highlighting the current refugee situation around the world. Click on the image to watch this amazing dance act by our own Benke Rydman.
And our wonderful changeover crew busted their ass for 30 very short seconds in between every performance. Here you can see the stage markings for Austria while the smoke clears from Cyprus. A very positive side effect of having an LED floor.
And for the first time in Eurovision history they are allowing the Big 5 plus last year’s winner, who are already qualified to the Finals, to perform their songs live for the audience instead of just showing a video clip like in years past. Here’s Frans from Sweden! They actually did the live performance at rehearsals on May 9 then showed the live clip to the broadcast audience on the 10th, but they won’t be voted on until the Finals. Sweden, Spain and France were shown last night and UK, Germany and Italy will be shown during Semi-final 2.
But hey! We just have one down, and two to go, so I really got to run!
But before I go, I need to share the calculations that Gustav Thyden did regarding power consumption of lighting in this show.
We have 1296 PDU Channels with separate residual current devices. This is equivalent to the amount of fuses in 100 mid size apartments when it comes to the switches and 1 400 apartments when it comes to the residual current devices.
We also have 6 dimmer channels!
We are comsuming 80 000Ah on a regular day of rehearsal or programming. This is exactly the amount of energy required to make 514 cubic meters of microwave popcorn. But it would take 3 years of constant popping if you only have one microwave oven.
So, if we look at the total amount of energy that lighting is consuming throughout this production, we could pop 15 000 000 liters of popcorn. Enough to fill ¼ of the Globe Arena. But we would need to spend 90 years of constant popping to do it, if we only use one microwave oven. And we would have to spend 10 000 000€ on the microwave corn, if we want popcorn with butter flavor, and how can you not want butter flavor on your popcorn?
Onwards and POPwards!
Photo credits: The Netherlands, Croatia and Austria – Andres Putting, EBU
