"We were approached by creative director Dan Shipton and the BBC Eurovision team to help make Electro Velvet stand out during this year's performances," says Bryn Williams, creative director of Light Initiative.
Working alongside costume designer Frank Strachan and his costume maker Natascha Stolle, the team incorporated 20,000 video-mapped LEDs into the outfits with 5,500 on singer Bianca's dress alone. Unlike many incarnations of this idea seen in the past, the costume team's clever design 'seamlessly' assimilated the LED into the costumes, along with the fabric, glittering sequins and tassels, with no detriment to the overall aesthetic.
"It was of paramount importance that the costumes be beautiful," says Williams. "Often when people shoehorn LED into a costume it's just inappropriate. We wanted it to maintain the stunning look of the outfit and for it to be discrete when off, so that the big reveal had maximum impact.
"From the settling of requirements, we only had only two weeks to get the first costumes built before tech rehearsals began," explains Williams. "Alongside integrating the LED into the costumes, we had to create a bespoke wearable control device, like a mini media server, from scratch. This meant writing all the software and building the hardware, which was small and discrete, about the size of an iPhone with custom batteries."
To bring it all to life, tailored content for the screens and costumes was created by Potion Pictures. The costumes were then video-mapped using an Avolites Ai media server to capture a portion of this overall canvas, such that during the performance the on-stage elements became a single cohesive whole.
Eurovision 2015 lighting designer Al Gurdon could wireless trigger playback and also dynamically set intensities of the costumes using DMX dimmer channels, an additional feature of the system provided by Light Initiative.
(Jim Evans)
