Project Type
Project Name
Design Criteria
Project Description
- Grand Final
- Semi-Final 2
- Semi-Final 1.
Challenges and Solutions
The Stadthalle was the binding constraint. It is an older, city-owned hall with suspended ceilings, ventilation plant and limited rigging points all fighting for the same overhead space. The roof slopes inward, so the lowest clearance — about 15m — sits exactly where the show needs the most height - the building itself the biggest challenge.
Designer Florian Wieder’s concept — a curved “leaf” infinity screen, a sound-wave passerelle (or walkway), and a golden “construct” — had to be built around those limits and around Eurovision’s rules. Between the 35 competing acts the stage had to reset in about 40–42 seconds while the postcard played. Props are weight-capped (no grand pianos), and competing performances are limited to six people on stage. Two camera tracks ran through the deck, splitting it into three islands with only about 40 mm between them, plus a “peek-a-boo” lift that could travel 8m. The Green Room sat opposite, linked by a catwalk that looped the floor and climbed into the roof like a rollercoaster, so hosts and the winner’s walk were always crossing the same geometry the acts were using. Build and strike were equally tight: about 2,000 m² and 210 tons of stage in under two weeks.
In total there was an Opening Ceremony, a Flag Parade, 3 guest artists acts in the grand finale, 2 guest artist acts in the SemiFinal 2 & 3 guest artist acts in the SemiFinal 1 that had to sit inside Wieder’s leaf, passerelle and infinity wall, under about 15 m of clearance at centre, on a deck already cut by camera tracks.
All in all we worked with 20 different artists (some bands), 40 dancers, 6 aerialists, a 48 person acrobatic troupe, a 60 person choir & a 55-piece orchestra.
Equipment
This was the first ESC lit entirely with LED and laser sources: about 2,100 fixtures and more than 8,500 individually controllable LEDs, no conventional lamps.
The roof forced the signature move. Traditional moving trusses would have been too heavy and would have blocked the clean infinity screen, so the overhead budget went into 80 individual Kinetic Lights Winch XL units, each carrying one fixture (Ayrton Rivale Profiles in the final rig) with a gyroscope. Payload was tight — the winch’s useful capacity sat around 35 kg, and the fixture plus gyro nearly filled it. Every lamp could fly on its own at about 1.5 m/s, with live XYZ data back to the console so a beam could stay locked on a point while the fixture moved. That is far harder to load-monitor than flying a whole truss, and it is what the low roof bought them.
Team
Creative & Show Director - Michael Schwandt (Michael Schwandt, Inc.)