The first 2 Eurovision blog posts I did onsite in the downtimes between tech and rehearsals and thought I was going to continue the trend but in all honesty there wasn’t a whole load to blog about. Once we got into rehearsals and shows, we were very much into groundhog day territory repeating the same processes every day of many many rehearsals, updating content and programming based off client feedback and repeating until showtime. To make this final Eurovision 2025 post condensing almost three weeks worth of work and play into a single post based from my collection of photos and memories from the gig.
For remote content delivery we decided to use MASV for file transfers which is a high speed secure file transfer service. Each country had its own portal and password protected login page with a short form to fill in to identify the packages of content. Once a package was uploaded it was then automatically downloaded at our end to the main content ingestion machine, it was also pushed to Frame for review by the contest team and once done we got a slack notification. Onsite we had a dedicated 10gb connection to our room provided by the venue which we often saturated as MASV will use the full bandwidth. It was such a great workflow and we were never once missed a rehearsal slot waiting for downloads to complete.
During our stay in Basel we had 2 full days off on separate occasions, the first one Luke and myself joined some of the lighting team and went for a float down the Rhine an on our second day off we decided to take the train an hour and a half south to Lucerne. This was a wonderful day off away from screens where we hung out by the lake drinking beers playing uno on the grass with the occasional dip in the water.
We were staying at the Senevita apartments for our time in Basel which was a really nice apartment, 15 mins walk to the venue. The Senevita is also an assisted living complex for the elderly and it was nice saying hello to the residents in the morning as they were going for breakfast and we were going to work. Most of the elevators int he complex had pictures of flowers in them but one was empty from the time we arrived there so we decided to print a picture of Sam’s dog Norman for the residents to enjoy. Unfortunately it was removed the following day but it was fun whilst it lasted.
Maybe about two or three weeks into being onsite Gustav & Philip created CTFM which was a webpage linked to APIs where the whole production could put in three song requests a day and there was dedicated time slots each day for these requests to be played. For the rest of the time there was a fantastic radio station of songs curated by Nora. If you wanted to listen to CTFM you just had to ask coms help at Riedel and they would add it to the panel.
As we got closet to the show days there were more ducks appearing and they weren’t coming form us this time. The camera departments had an addition of a little baby duck tot he family when doing sync checks, it was a joy to see everyone getting in on this.
This is probably a good place to wrap up this final ESC post, its was a fantastic gig to be on with such a good bunch of folk. We had three very clean broadcasts all down to the hard work of the massive team involved.
Us and just some of team CT after the final show, high spirits and smiley faces.