Also involved were 400 MAC 2000 Washes, 76 MAC 600 washlights and 112 Atomic 3000 strobes with an extra 20 MAC 600s adding colour to the VIP Green Room. Main technical supplier for the Eurovision Song Contest was Procon Event Engineering. PRG served as a secondary supplier with a local Russian contractor also supplying some equipment. Supervising all of this was Rich Gorrod from Incandescent Design.
More than 750 moving heads and over 100 km of cabling were utilised. Procon sent 42 trailer trucks with technical equipment and a team of more than 70 people to this year's event at the Olimpiysky Arena Moscow.
Incandescent Design was contracted to provide the core team (17 in all) to deliver the 'creative front end' for the production. The amount of square footage of video was unprecedented for this type of show with the LC wall the key background element of the set design. "The set was an environment that was almost entirely video and my job as lighting designer was to make the most of that, to work with it and integrate the lighting with it," explains Al Gurdon.
Gurdon says he started with the video as the key or base to the look of each song and then built the lighting around it. Sometimes the video was changed dramatically to better underpin the musical tone and dynamics.
The LC wall served as a powerful and customisable dynamic background. It was made up of three overlapping sections (for set change purposes), each section about 35m long and 11-12m high.
"The LED panels had to be something relatively low res and low cost but still sufficient," Gurdon stated. "Weight was also a significant factor. There were weight issues in the arena and we couldn't hang them so they were supported by a large scaffold wall. Something higher res obviously would have been greater cost and heavier.
"Generally the LC wall worked very well as there was a sufficient distance from the camera and it worked in relation to the rest of the set," Gurdon concludes. "We deliberately organised it so the high res LED was closer to the camera and the low res further away."
(Jim Evans)
