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British designer Tim Routledge has tackled some large projects in his time, from Stormzy to Beyoncé, but the Eurovision Song Contest was always on his bucket list of shows to design. The event has had a fairly turbulent couple of years, it was canceled during the pandemic, came back in 2021 with special measures, got back on track in Turin, Italy in 2022, but hit another hiccup when the winning performance was from Ukraine. Typically, the winner hosts the next year's competition, giving the production and design teams almost a full year to work on the annual event. However, any hope of Ukraine hosting the event faded as the war following Russia’s invasion dragged on and potential host cities lost infrastructure to the bombing. By the time the runner up, the UK, had confirmed it would host and had picked the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool as the venue, the design team had only nine months left to prepare for Eurovision 2023.
The Eurovision Song Contest is livestreamed over three nights to a TV audience of more than 160 million. Routledge explains the scope of work on the largest nonsporting live event in the world. “Eurovision is known for being a big light show with a fantastic set, and the whole show needs to transformational. We need to provide 37 different creative looks for the different international delegations, and then there are eight or so halftime time shows, openers, and parades.“ The show is broadcast live but also has an audience in the arena itself, so the design must engage both. “The show has to evolve, and when you have a four-and-a-half-hour live TV show it’s got to change or it won’t hold people’s attention. As designers we also have to provide opportunities for all of the delegations to do something different creatively.”
The Set
Routledge calls the set, designed by Julio Hemedes and Yellow Studio, New York, a “gift.” He says, “I love the architecture, it gave me some really interesting light cues, although it was a tricky set because it's enclosed in a box. Lighting this for television was difficult but I relished the challenge.”
He interpreted the four big, curved arms around the stage as a hug, and populated them with around 190 Sharpy X-Frames. He calls them, “The Swiss Army knife of lights. They can do everything and they’re a hybrid. They edged the set and by using their entire beam it extended that hug all the way down the room. That was one of the easiest looks because the set told me what I needed to do.”
Backlighting a Video Set
“It was quite hard to backlight anybody on that stage, or to give it any depth, in video mode because its got a video floor, ceiling, walls, and backwall," Routledge says. To overcome, this he embedded Acme pixel lines at the top and bottom of all the video screens. “Without the video, you have a negative-space box of linear light.” He calls them a sleek-looking modern fixture.
Tight Spaces
The set included doors that spun and traveled up and down the stage, and the mechanism for that took up a lot of space. Routledge says, “We were wafer thin between trusses up in the roof. I had 12 trusses running up and down stage in between the mechanisms of the moving screen, and six of these were on Kinesys. Literally everything was squeezed within a hair’s breadth to make it work.”
The Fixtures
Claypaky Scenius Unico were used for effect lights, key light, and backlight.
On the rear doors he used 200 Robe Tetra X, which have a flower effect and rotate in both directions. Behind the spinning doors, he added another layer of lights including Robe Paintes and Cuetes and 300 Martin Sceptrons.
The rest of the rig included Robe Spiiders around the stage and Wahlberg lifts, which he chose because they are a tiny, compact lift that can carry a 30 or 40 kilo light on each one and lift it up to 1.8 meters. “We hid those within the B stage so the lights could lift up and form different architecture. For example, you could put a “cage” around a B-stage performance quickly creating another transformation.”
Routledge also created 10 of what he dubbed Svoboda 3000 pods. “We named them after Joseph Svoboda, the scenographer my dad was a big fan of. A Svoboda is an old theatre light, seven light sources creating a parallel beam like a light curtain, and I've always loved them. However, I needed them to change color so we couldn’t really use the old Svobodas for this, so by using other lights we made a Svoboda on acid.” [Click here for the decades-old specs from Theatre Crafts.] The more sustainable LED versions were trapezoid-shaped pods with nine Zonda 9 FX from Ayrton and seven GLP impression FL 10 Bars on each one, and they flew individually or together on Kinesys.
In addition, there were Ayrton Cobras, Martin Mac Viper AirFXs, and the audience was lit with Claypaky B-EYE K-25s. He says, “For key light, I'm a big fan of the Robe Forte. It is a beautiful key light fixture and great spotlight, and we used it on the end of the Robe spots. We had 15 of those, and we had another 75 or so Fortes doing key light so the key lights matched the follow spots’ color temperature exactly.”
All the fixtures were LEDs and came from Neg Earth Lights.
The Venue
Compared to other Eurovision venues, the M&S Bank Arena Is quite small. The designers found that the smaller venue actually helped stretch budgets further, and the venue had other benefits. Routledge says, “What we created in that venue looked massive, and the beautiful thing about the arena is it has an exhibition hall and a convention center within it, so there was a huge amount of prop storage space, huge dressing room areas for the delegations, and vast media and catering areas so it turned out to be a great venue. It is also located right in central Liverpool, so the vibe in the city was amazing and the European Broadcasting Union loved it."
The Schedule
Routledge got the job in the last week of October and his team spent Christmas drawing, revising, and working out budgets before sending the project out to tender by the first week in January. “The first week of February we had to present a full model of what we were offering to the delegations so they could work out what they were going to do,” he says. “They got four or five weeks to create decks to present to us in Liverpool, and in the middle of March, the delegates told us what camera shots they wanted, the look and feel, and any extras.”
Typically, Eurovision releases a few images of the set during the promotional build-up to the show, but Routledge says they input Julio Himede’s set into Depence 3 and made a full fly-through, which was then released to the public. He says, “It's quite unusual to give away your whole show, but they used it as a publicity tool to get people excited. Our fly-through ended up on the news!”
Depence was integral to the success of the show. Routledge says, “We actually exceeded Depence’s universe count and they rewrote the software to give us over 330 universes.“
Control
Routledge believes his team were the first to use the grandMA 3 software on Eurovision. “ I was dubious at first but gave the programmers free rein and MA Lighting was there every step of the way looking after us and it was brilliant.”
He calls out a couple of things they would not have been able to do without the grandma 3. “If you change the quantity of fixtures you can literally just drop them into a group and it’s done. "Re-cooking the recipe is a very clever technique. And we use the offset feature for positions because we had so many beam lights that had to be precisely focused."
Designing for 37 Delegations
Routledge calls this process, “Absolutely mad.” He says, “The artists do a rehearsal, which we film. Then the incredible students we brought in from the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, took the director’s tapes and rehearsed with professional choreographers to stand in for the artists from each delegation. The concept is absolutely mad, but this has been going on for years at Eurovision. We film the run-throughs with lighting, camera cuts, etc, and then send the delegations a tape of our best version and they have 24 hours to send us notes.”
This year, Eurovision used a new system, sending notes to each department via a Frame.IO link. “Some notes were ‘Brilliant!’ and some were, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’” he jokes. “All you have to work on is a few minutes with them a month ago, and some ideas don't translate well. We had a pretty good hit rate, but there are always going to be notes.”
With upwards of two thousand notes between cameras, video, and lighting from 37 delegations, the Eurovision crews get three days to work through them before the performers arrive in the UK and start rehearsing.
To make the lighting changes, the team ran a 24-hour programming service. Routledge says that on past shows, programmers used to work 17-18 hours a day for six or seven weeks beforehand. Rather than allow the team to get fried, he set up a 10- or 12-hour programming day shift and saved some programming and focusing notes for a night shift.
Design Challenges
Typically, a rock show has a certain narrative to it, as the designer and artist take the audience on a journey through new songs, old favorites, and big anthems. For Eurovision, the running order is basically picked out of a hat so there is no narrative arc, or even build up for the end of the evening, and colors and specials are determined independently of the songs that will come before or after. Routledge says, “Sometimes you can end up with six songs in a row where the delegations want them to be in red. We try and educate them, or say ‘maybe try this,’ but if that’s what they want we don’t want to lead them down a path they don’t want to travel.”
Although some delegations, such as the winning act, Loreen, have a finished design from a professional designer (in this instance Tobias Rylander) many of them do not, and Routledge and his team are willing to set up looks that they know will not work just to help the delegations work through their ideas, before making suggestions for alternate designs. In a 30-minute rehearsal the delegations have three passes of the song and at the end of each run they give notes. “My associate James Scott and I take the notes and determine the priority: Can we get one note done for the next pass? Will we have to wait and do it that night?” The delegates go from the rehearsal to the viewing room where another associate, Morgan Evans, watches the tape with them frame by frame, and look at every camera angle. Those notes are sent on Cuepilot and Routledge sends them out to the programmers.
Sweden
The winning song, performed by Loreen, featured a 'burger bun' mini stage, which had a gap of only 600 mm before opening up. Routledge says "We had to get key light into that. There were two Steadicams on stage at the same time and you never want to see a Steadicam shadow, so we were constantly shifting light from the left to the right as the burger opens up."
The Workaround
“We had three Steadicams and there are a lot of Steadicam shots in those shows, so I mounted Astera FP6 Hydra panels on each one so we had color-changing key light," Routledge says. "That way, I could take out a follow spot in red and have the Astera panel on the front of the camera come on in red. It made a seamless takeover. I first tried this out on a shoot for an artist called WizKid and it worked quite well, and now the camera operators are invested in it.
"You can achieve the world with a headlamp on a camera!"
One of my favorite songs was from the Netherlands, it didn’t make it to the final but it was a beautiful look. It was on the B-stage at the end of a catwalk on a revolve and there was a light on the Steadicam spinning with the two performer and that was the only light. At the very end of the number, the doors are spun and there is a star field behind them.
The Key
When you are shooting a show for broadcast with a massive live audience in the arena, like Eurovision, you have to make sure that the audience can see what's going on. There's no point having an audience there that isn’t responding to the show.
