MAY 3
MAY 3
Ola amantes da música!
Yikes! Now it’s only three days till we’ll have artists and delegations in the house. But all preparations are going well, the dummy rehearsals of the songs have been a success, and we’re now fine tuning openings and interval acts. All good gummi snudd!
And for all of you metal heads out there,
Frederic Opsomer is in da house! Frederic is the founder of Tait Technologies, and came by to make sure that his boys and girls were behaving, and to buy them a Nespresso Machine!
It wouldn’t be the greatest show on earth without a visit from our sweetheart winner of 2012, Loreen. We try not to give away anything of what will happen in openings and interval acts, but having Loreen on stage is as big of a suprise as red wine actually being red.
Today I’ll explain the process of accreditations for this massive show. What does it take to organize thousands of people working on this production? Let’s find out! First we’ll take a look at our humble venue from space. The red X marks where Malmoe Expo is now (this image was taken a pretty long time ago – before the trade show hall and Emporia were built! I’m in the arena. Google earth should pass Malmoe a bit more often, since this picture was taken 2008…………….
Meet our Accreditation Manager Pelle Möller, from the company Shopman which provides the highest-quality accreditation services, as well as developing innovative systems and products for large scale events.
Pelle works with Cardina Tidesjö, Assistant Accreditation Manager and Daniel Erlandsson, Technical Manager (not pictured) to help everything run smoothly.
Here’s the friendly staff at the front desk. Including the management team, there are 15 on the accreditation staff, plus another 20 volunteers, making sure that the average wait to get accreditations is no longer than 6 minutes!
In total this office will process 10,000 accreditations for the entire crew, plus delegations, artists, press and everyone else working on Eurovision.
This may look like a 1980s Atari video game (for those of you who remember Atari!) but it’s actually a map showing all the accreditation levels and the zones where each person is permitted to enter.
Clearly the zone map is much too complicated for anyone to memorize or have the time to reference, so each accreditation is embedded into our photo ID tags on an RFID, which not only verifies our identity and permission to enter certain zones, it also contains our catering and even unlocks arena doors (the ones we’re permitted to enter). Here’s Jon Ola demonstrating how easy it is. I guess they let him in, thank God!
Shopman developed their own proprietary software in 1999 which keeps track of the RFID chips, zones and everything else needed for the show. Changes to the RFIDs can be done on a laptop and are instantly updated to all the scanning points. So for example if an accreditation is stolen and someone tries to use it, they will be denied access and the ID badge will be confiscated. Shopman does big festivals like Sonisphere, Melodifestivalen and Way Out West, to sports events including the Swedish Open, keeping track of wristbands for thousands of fans, so they know what they’re doing!
We’ll end today with a very special performance by our own Stuart Barlow. Click on the photo to see this fantastic video!
He tried to pay me $5000 NOT to post this video, but as the dedicated investigating journalist that I am, chasing the brutal truth worldwide, I said: “No you Scottish faggot” your family must know what Eurovision is turning you into. So HA on you!
( I know I will live to regret this)
