May 7

WELCOME TO THE 10TH EDITION OF THE EUROVISION DIARY!
Another day of rehearsals has ended! For the first time since we got here, the air conditioning is up and running, and Oh my gosh is it running! It’s almost snowing in the venue! That, in combination with that the loading doors are still open, made it really hard to get the fog to work well during the rehearsals today. We’ll have these problems a couple of more days before we can close those doors for good. Well….. at least till load out anyway.
Here is Belgium on stage today, with their song Copycat. I made a mistake yesterday, and wrote that this was Holland. Sorry about that! Sometimes the fingers moves too fast over the keyboard! Holland is competing with a song called Shine, performed by ¨The Toppers¨ !

We FINALLY got the front projectors up and running! We’re using three Christie Roadie 20 000 Ansi Lumen projectors with High End Orbital Heads. On the picture, it’s Belarus performing, on of the delegations that has requested this effect. It works REALLY well, as you can see, and it’s really fun to have the Orbital Heads back into the production! They haven’t been used on Eurovision since 2002 in Estonia, when the system was brand spanking new!

Superman is in da house! Actually this is SUPER GYPSY! from the Czech Republic! Isn’t this the coolest graphic?? Speaking of which, did you know that the content created for the show has 8,743,380 pixels per frame. Thats roughly 43,716,900,000 pixels for the average duration of a song. Or 2,185,845,000,000 for the whole show if you like!
Or……
If you mapped those pixels onto circuit board with 50mm distance( just like a schnick schnack) and laid them end to end, they would reach to the moon and back 142 TIMES! That is like travel 3/4 of the way to the sun!

There are a lot of things being built during the night shifts in the venue. Risers for audience seats maybe for example.
Or strange truss constructions for a interval act that will FREAK YOU OUT!

Christer Björknoff….ööh, I mean Björkman is in da house! Christer is the Head Of Delegation from Sweden, and also a member of the EBU reference group.

Meanwhile up in followspots…

Hedvig is having a blast!

Informative signs in catering. I like the one in the upper right: “For positive decision of this problem.”

This is actually the local song contest on Ireland, where they chose the song representing them in this contest!
Imagine that!

Yepp! Woof Woof!