Pre-production Update 5
Pre-production Update 5
Greetings from planet Eurovision! While everyone else is celebrating Easter, I thought I’d do a new update of the blog. Bitter? Not at all!
And I got the COOLEST Easter gift for y’all!
As the shape of the stage came in place, Fredrik started to scribble on a lighting design. His first idea was based on surrounding the whole stage with ¨ribs¨ which was a really cool idea. But later, he cancelled that, in favor of something that is best described as a ¨wall of death¨. Mess with him, and you’ll dance in the dark!
I’m not sure that it’s wise to show this image, since this is equal to me confessing that I’m the biggest M&M smuggler in the world. Then again, with our company name…..makes sense….. Christer Björkman was VERY thrilled though, when he one morning came into the office, only to find it covered with 12 kg of various peanut butter candy.
Next trip went to Denmark! To Aarhus to be more specific! But we were not there to visit Martin Professional, well…..sort of, since we visited the founder of Martin Professional, Mr Peter Johansen, and his new company SGM. We really liked what we found at the SGM booth at LDI in Vegas, and decided to take a closer look. After succesfully stealing a SVT company car at their compound in Malmö, we headed over the bridge to the country of beer and sandwiches. Fellow partners in crime were from left to right: Bertil Göransson, whom actually has THREE different postions in this show. 1* He is our transport coordinator. 2* He is the producer of PLASA Focus Malmö (I hope you clicked on the link up top) 3* Is our live site manager. In the middle you’ll Johan Moritz, the Malmö city lighting designer. Yes, you heard correct, I’ll get back to him in a minute, and Viktor to the far right. I’ve no idea whom the muppet in the back is, but he was VERY upset over having to ride in a Ford all day.
We discovered that we could take a ferry half way back to Malmö, instead of driving, so off we went. Here Fredrik and Johan enjoying the nice December weather. Johan is actually a full time employed lighting designer for the city of Malmö. When he took the job several years ago, he was very excited over joining such a cool network of lighting designers. Turns out that Malmö is the only city in the world that has a full time lighting designer employed, so Johan IS the network 🙂
We came up with a bunch of crazy ideas at SGM, and next stop was back to Tait in Belgium to test one of them. We had been debating the be-or-not-to-be LED floor. We had an LED floor at Eurovision already in Latvia 10 years ago and it felt like a really old way of going. So we were all in agreement that if we should do an LED floor, we should do it in a way that never had been done before. SGM shipped a pile of LT-100 to Tait for tests, and here is Matt with the Alpha version of our newly invented 3D LED floor!
Sven in action. Since we’re doing a TV show, we’re looking at all tests in camera, since the eye sees one thing, but the camera sees something completely different.
And while Frida is admiring Sven, Frederic and Matt are discussing where we’ll go for dinner and drinks later that evening.
Sven found this door sign at Tait’s office. I guess you have to be from Sweden to understand how funny this is! We’ve no idea what it means in Belgian!
Once the decision was made to go with projection, we needed to define and create our projection layer. The set designers had been working very hard on this layer, and came up with a very nice piece, inspired by the flight of a butterfly, and at the same time meeting Mikki’s wish of an abstract surface. For reasons I can’t go into, this layer could not be done with a projection screen, it needed to be something that was self supported, had a value of its own, even without projection, but still with a high gain. Tait found the PERFECT material. Lotta Schiefer from Barco was kind enough to join us this day, with a HDQ-2K40 projector,and Mikki brought a HippoPortamus, so we could look at the material with some content on it. Matt and Frederic are STILL discussing what’s for dinner in the background!
Lotta doesn’t only work for Barco. She sell her own wine as well! I’m not sure about the marketing of it though………………. Legendary?
Speaking of legend! Kristoffer Röhr to the right in this picture, was the LD at my very first Eurovision Song Contest back in 2000! Fredrik and Emma were the operators on that show! Good times!
So, staging was on track, projection more or less, and we had also chosen our partner for lighting, rigging and sound. A joint venture between Starlight from Sweden and PRG from…… I guess the rest of the world, will cater all our needs. Glad to have you onboard fellows! Even though our negotiations are not running so smooth at the moment…………… 🙂
I’ve realized that I need to put out 2-3 updates next week to keep the schedule up till we go live, so STAY ALERT!
