It must have been around February 2023 when I got a call from Chris asking if I was up for being part of the video programming team for the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 in Liverpool. I of course said yes, not only because it was an exciting gig to be involved with but more-so I knew who else was on the team and it was a bunch of folk I love working with.
This year the UK was hosting Eurovision on behalf of the UK and the venue was Liverpool arena. For the event the spaces in the arena that were usually used as offices for the day to day running of the complex were cleared and kindly handed over to Eurovision for the duration of the gig.
Harry(Hazza)R, DanH, AlexP, DanL and MikeS from QED were onsite with us doing a sterling job of getting the system in and keeping it up running. We had a boatload of disguise servers for the massive led screens, several projection elements for the show and also Luke, Jack, Sam & myself had a dedicated server each as an editor for system consistency. Ed was also on the team and in charge of media wrangling for all the content that was coming in from various providers.
Dan & Harry had set up a nice system for each of our programming stations where we had a stream deck triggering presets in a rack-mount audio mixer which was routing the different timecode sources and audio to and from the editor machines. This meant we could each be independently programming parts of the show using the shared audio tracks striped with the relevant timecode played back from our local machines. It was a really nice clean solution and helped speed up the workflow being able to instantly switch and listen to TC and audio sources so quickly.
Also part of the team we had Emily, Brigsy and Max from d3 who were onsite with us for support and implementing the spike mark system for the event. The spike mark system was a nice elegant solution where the stage management team who were onstage with ipads were able to notate positions on the led drawing various symbols. These could be saved as snapshots/presets pushed on the server sending signal to the floor. Emily and Brigsy had developed the main core months previous to us loading in and were constantly adding and improving to the system onsite. The first time we had a try of the system onsite it was really intuitive and we (I) came up with this.
I wasn’t the only one drawing speed dobbers onstage, here are team d3 looking proud, apart from max who isn’t as childish as the rest of us.
The d3 programming part of the show was pretty smooth and we had enough people to handle the work during rush times so there was no real stress moments. When content came in we divided the work to program individual tracks, sync the timecode tags and check for errors. Most act content came in as single tracks but there were a few that needed sequencing and some with camera perspective tricks that needed care and attention working with the director and cameras to get it looking correct. Luke was lead programmer pulling in the individual programmed tracks between us, assembling the final show timeline and sitting in the hot seat for the show.
In addition to the content on screen for the competition performances we also had content fir the presenter looks, the flag parade and the interstitial performances which happened between some of the songs. For this we had a team from the lovely people at Northouse who are always great to work with. There was quite a bit of sequencing i needed to do for this as there were many requests for changes in the content from above so we were receiving small sections at a time and adjusting timings as and when the audio tracks changed.
Try and find a picture of us all with northouse to go here.
I always try to create a nice working environment when on jobs and im a big fan of having ambient lighting around the office, so during the first few days i distributed fairy lights around the team to decorate the desks and also bought a few lava lamps for the mood too. Chris joined in on the fun too with his northern lights ceiling projector and a scent machine to make the office smell like a cheap spa.
We had 2 projection gags during the show, one for Ukraine and one for Armenia. The ukrane set was wheeled onto stage and the alignment had to be spot on to avoid any spill and also it was tightly mapped to the choreography. After a few teething problems hetting the set on and off and set in exactly the right position the stage mangent team were really good at hitting the mark with the set.
Even though the stage team got the location of the set spot on there was always room for tweaking and during to the show Jack was tweaking the lineup via a camera shot in the short turnaround before the number.
The other projection gag for Armenia was a trapezoidal’ish shaped ramp that the artist was standing on, in the projection. For this the set was made up of 2 pieces and the crew wheeled it onstage, stayed under it during the performance and wheeled it back off, it was brilliant to watch.
Heres an image of harry on the ramp being a stand in whilst the projection was beign focused and tested.
We had a 50k firing at from around 80m away at the set piece and it was so bright with no problem of being washed out by lighting.
In addition to the projection gags we also had a couple of forced perspective gags for an interstitial performance by Ukraine and content from Freckled Sky, the other was for the UK entry. The Ukraine pwerformance calles welcome to our house was a beautiful piece with two dancers performing against led backdrop depicting what was going on in the Ukraine at that time. There were several tricks in the content and choreography where through the camera when the performers walked behind a slab of led it looked like they continued into a virtual world as the content carries on their movement and silhouette.
The content was rendered out from a “hero shot” perspective where we had to map onto the virtual set in d3 and then this was displayed on the physical set. We then also had to work with the director and camera department to match as closely as possible the physical camera to our virtual camera, position and focal length.
Below is an embedded video of the performance which helps visually show whats going on much better than I can describe.
Id never really watch Eurovision for many years, I do remember watching it as a kid but this was the first time in ages that I was actually mentally invested in the competition. Between all of us there were 2 clear favourites that we were routing for and those were Croatia & Finland. Outside the venue Croatia had a mobile sauna and one of those good photo opportunity which we didnt think twice about sticking our heads through the holes for the camera.
After the show was over all of the acts were walking past our control room and everyone was cheering them on. Alum, one of the team from CT was a fellow Croatian of the band Let 3 and he fagged them down in the corridor and got a picture with them.
Overall the event was really well put together and such a wealth of talent working on a show together, it was one of those gigs that you kept bumping into people that you’ve not seen in a long time. This post could be much longer going into the technical intricacies for the show, how the whole team where referencing CuePilot for the programming of the show which is a fantastic system, to how we were picking up the automation and recording it into d3 so we had the ability to program offline with the correct screen moves. Its been nice to write this but have left out a lot, if theres anything yous like to know about the screens side please drop me an email.
Of course not forgetting the whole gig was peppered with googly eyes being stuck all over the venue and Liverpool.
