Falk Rosenthal of Gravity content agency is an Emmy and BAFTA Award winner and was honored with an Eyes and Ears Excellence Award in 2018 for his video design work. He has worked on Eurovision Song Contests since 2011, and in 2017 won an Eyes & Ears of Europe Award for his content design for the mammoth music event.
Rosenthal talked to Live Design about his company’s design work on this year's contest.
Live Design: Can you talk us through the process of designing for 42 delegations and several interval acts?
Falk Rosenthal: In mid-March, about two months before the show, everyone presents their concept and presents their songs on stage. Some of them have ideas for the screen content and how they want it to look and others say, “Hey, we trust you. Make it look good.”
Some ask to build their own stuff but others need help because most countries are not used to setting up for such a large-scale video screen or this technical setup. Most of the designs are done by us from a core idea of what it should look like that they give us. They confirm how the overall feeling of the performance should be, and that’s where our work starts.
The first half [of the time] is doing draft concepts, so in the first four of five weeks we try to get a video done for each country and that’s what we distribute to production and to the lighting design because they start programming the lighting and need an idea of which direction we are going.
By the end of the process, each country gets [a full technical rehearsal] twice, 30 mins onstage for the first time and 20 minutes for the second time, so we can all see how it comes together and after that we have notes to work on. By the final week everyone was super happy.
LD: How do you keep all the moving parts together?
FR: You do everything you can do from a technical point of view, so each song is programmed on timecode and is full playback. We deliver videos at full length which means for the front of house guys it is just about pressing a button to start. It’s not like other shows where you have big video screens and high involvement of live video at the same time. Here, everything is programmed. The director is using Cue Pilot which means they have precise frame cuts and we are doing cuts for each shot that sync up. Malta is a good example, when you look carefully in different camera shots there are different videos running. In Ukraine the video is timecoded otherwise it wouldn’t be so precisely on beat and you couldn’t get this kind of immersive experience.
LD: Tell us about how you used the screens.
FR: There is the [170' x 40'] main screen, the floor is a video screen, and there is a transparent runway screen which comes down for some performances which are on the B stage, which is out in front of the main stage. The B stage has a video floor, too. So we are providing content for four big screens.
The runway screen comes down from the ceiling and it is transparent. You don’t see it unless you need to. Some performances, like Croatia, used this for nearly a complete song as an alternative to the main stage and it made it more diverse in terms of looks. I think that’s the best thing about Eurovision this year, because in past years it was just one stage, this year we have two places for performance.
LD: Was it difficult designing work that fit with the other departments?
FR: It’s a balance between all the departments and we are very experienced in this kind of work. We have done big awards shows like the Video Awards for MTV several times, and our company is doing around 100 shows a year including America’s Got Talent, American Idol, The Voice, and Dancing With The Stars and so we knows what works and what doesn’t work. On this project we started programming video at the same time as lighting was being programming. The lighting designer knows when he sees the content what he needs to do and the same for us. It is a parallel process.
LD: What is the main challenge?
FR: It is such a big production you always try to be cutting edge whatever you are doing. Augmented reality has been big for the last few years because we’ve got the gear worked out and it’s capable of doing time-rendered work. It is a little bit avant-garde in terms of scale, and you have to deal with unknowns, such as lighting/haze/fog in that moment, when you create content for augmented reality. It is a prevision thing in your head, but reality speaks a different language. You are trying to implement whatever you create in a virtual environment so it blends together in the end. Concerts are not easy, because it’s not like in a sports studio or news studio where you just have lighting on the studio set up and then you build augmented reality around it. Here you start first with the augmented reality and then see what environment you’ve got. That’s the challenge.
Augmented Reality during Eurovision, The Power of Water was a combination of AR, lighting, and lasers which made the stadium appear to be underwater.
Watch Gravity's Falk Rosenthal discuss the difference between a graphical overlay and much more challenging augmented reality.
Key Gravity Crew
Visual director screens and augmented reality: Falk Rosenthal
Screen graphics producer: Thomas Neese
Screen graphics producer assistant: Annika Evers
Lead graphics designer: Armin Lintl