The Eurovision Song Contest has at all times been a mammoth enterprise, however this 12 months’s occasion has been a feat like no different.

“We came to this four months later than would normally happen because of course while Ukraine won in 2022, it took some time to understand whether or not they would be in a position to host the contest,” says James O’Brien, govt accountable for manufacturing at BBC Studios. “Add to that the current economic climate, and the fact that the UK event industry is busier than ever, and you start to get a picture of how challenging it has been to even get out of the starting blocks.”

He continues: “As soon as we had our core production team at BBC Studios, the challenge was matching the scale and ambition of the show to the venue. As expected, though, the amazing team at the BBC, Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre, and our technical delivery team have brought it all together to deliver nine epic live shows.”

O’Brien will lead the workforce at BBC Studios chargeable for the technical supply of the stay exhibits, together with all different technical components within the venue itself. His expertise with large-scale occasions, together with the MTV Europe Music Awards, the London 2012 Olympics and the 2022 Commonwealth Games, means he is aware of what it takes to ship an occasion of this stature.

“My role is to bring in a team of creatives, production experts and suppliers to design, plan and install the production elements for the Contest,” O’Brien explains. “This includes set, LED, lighting, automation, rigging, screens content, broadcast facilities as well as all of the back-of-house support areas including the dressing rooms and catering. I also look after support services such as security and cleaning.”

To meet the very brief and intense timescales, O’Brien’s workforce depend on a digital duplicate of the Contest, which can be utilized for each troubleshooting and as a check mattress for brand new concepts. “We have a team of CAD engineers who are constantly updating the model of the show to enable us to make almost instantaneous decisions when problems arise,” he says.

“Technology is the tool in this situation, but the skill and talent come from designers. Technology means we can be certain about the decisions that we are making. With Eurovision, we have 37 acts and a number of interval acts to put onto the stage. Each one has props, set pieces and lights. AutoCAD allows us to fully realise how each country wants to use the stage and to ascertain what’s achievable. I’m not sure it would be possible to stage the Contest to its current high level if it weren’t for this technology.”

No Eurovision Song Contest is full with out a powerful stage – and this 12 months the duty for that goes to set designer Julio Himede. Himede has designed units for a lot of main occasions and TV exhibits together with the 64^th Annual Grammy Awards, the 2018-2021 MTV Video Music Awards, the 2016-2021 MTV EMAs, Disney’s ‘Beauty and The Beast: A 30^th Celebration’ and the American Song Contest.

The stage design has been created on the rules of ‘togetherness, celebration and community’. “The architecture takes inspiration from a wide hug, opening its arms to Ukraine, the show’s performers and guests from across the world,” Himede stated in an interview for the Eurovision Song Contest’s official web site. “I focused on the cultural aspects and similarities between Ukraine, the UK and specifically Liverpool. From music, dance and art to architecture and poetry.”

From a technological standpoint, the stage is advanced. There’s greater than 450 sq. metres of staging, one other 220 sq. metres of independently shifting and turning video screens, in addition to over 700 video tiles built-in into the ground.

UK-based agency Creative Technology is offering the screens, together with the LED flooring. Meanwhile, digital expertise from Eurovision accomplice Disguise will show stage marks within the LED flooring. “This will allow us to turn the stage around between countries in just 40 seconds,” says O’Brien.

This is simply the beginning. Danish firm Cue-Pilot – which was based by internationally acclaimed director Per Zachariassen as a response to the necessity for precision and consistency in stay broadcasts – can be offering an automatic cueing system, which permits the delegations to script the cameras for his or her efficiency.

Then there’s the lighting. More than 1,500 metres of LED lights have been utilized by lighting designer Tim Routledge, a multi-award-winning lighting designer of BAFTA and Royal Television Society Awards. Routledge’s credit embody high-profile stay occasions and concert events corresponding to Stormzy’s 2019 Glastonbury Festival set, Spice Girls’ ‘Spice World’ UK Stadium Tour and Beyonce’s ‘Formation’ World Tour. TV credit embody ‘X Factor’, ‘Concert for Ukraine’, ‘Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony 2014’, ‘I Can See Your Voice’ and ‘Big Night of Musicals’.

As head of sound, BAFTA winner Robert Edwards will convey his Eurovision expertise to the 2023 occasion as he was beforehand sound supervisor for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon. Other credit embody ‘The Masked Singer UK’, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, ‘X Factor’ and, extra not too long ago, Edwards blended the world feeds for the opening and shutting ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Tokyo and Beijing and was additionally a part of the host broadcaster workforce for the World Cup Coverage in Qatar.

“My role is to be responsible for all the sound associated with the radio and television broadcasts from Liverpool for the contest,” says Edwards. “I work for the BBC and Eurovision in making sure that the rules of the song contest are upheld, and that each country is treated equally and fairly. This involves organising all the sound coverage, making sure we plan effectively for any eventuality, but also to ensure the broadcasts all sound as good as possible. This also includes making sure the unique atmosphere of the event is shared by the hundreds of millions of live listeners and viewers.”

Edwards faces an enormous quantity of strain in his function. “As far as is humanly possible, we have to ensure that we can cope with everything and anything within the live programmes,” he says. “We must ensure that we capture and deliver the best sound of the performances, the best sound of the music, and to provide a soundscape that engages the world.”

New applied sciences are enabling Edwards and the remainder of the sound workforce to be extra artistic. “Fibre digital connections have largely replaced virtually all analogue copper circuits within broadcasting,” he explains. “The fibre bandwidth is phenomenal, and web protocol (IP) working is a part of the language of sound now. IP provides many extra potentialities to manage and form the sound. All the audio system within the venue are fed by way of audio video bridging (AVB), microphones are fed by way of digital audio community by ethernet (Dante) – a mixture of software program, {hardware} and community protocols that ship uncompressed, multi-channel, low-latency digital audio over an ordinary ethernet community.

“Playback devices feed via a multi-channel audio digital interface and graphics machines feed through a musical instrument digital interface,” Edwards continues. “The path is digital throughout. For some time, the Eurovision Song Contest has been mixed and delivered in surround 5.1, but we continue to embrace immersive formats for delivery of feeds to our research colleagues.”

One of essentially the most iconic components of the Eurovision Song Contest is the voting course of, the transmission of which is the duty of Lennard Bartlett, a challenge chief at Switzerland-based media companies supplier Eurovision Services.

“For me, the biggest challenge is delivering live signals from 37 voting countries to be switched sequentially into the grand final,” Bartlett says. “There’s no other show that attempts something like that. It’s a feat of technical infrastructure and coordination to make it go smoothly.”

For every nation, Bartlett and his workforce safe a primary and backup sign utilizing a number of transportation strategies – satellite tv for pc, fibre and video over IP (VoIP).

“We also use the latest satellite encryption and modulation standards to secure the transmissions, as well as our in-house Flex VoIP,” Bartlett says.

Eurovision Services’ Flex answer gives a way of transmission in locations the place conventional broadcast fibre isn’t obtainable or could be prohibitively costly. The product takes up little or no house and the dashboard gives a straightforward interface in order that connections could be managed immediately from a laptop computer.

Every 12 months, the expertise Bartlett makes use of is improved to make sure elevated safety. This 12 months isn’t any exception. “Every year we reassess technology we are using and measures we need to take to mitigate threats to signal security,” he says. “We try to stay one step ahead by using technology to combat potential cyber-security threats that we face.”

Another much-loved a part of the Eurovision Song Contest is the short-form postcards which precede every nation’s stay efficiency.

London-based tv manufacturing firm Windfall Films has been commissioned to make this 12 months’s postcards, which is able to symbolize the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest slogan: ‘United by Music’. The new slogan demonstrates the distinctive partnership between the United Kingdom, Ukraine and host metropolis Liverpool to convey the Eurovision Song Contest to audiences throughout the globe and the ability of music to convey communities collectively. It additionally displays the very origins of the Contest, developed to convey Europe nearer collectively by a shared tv expertise throughout completely different nations.

Windfall Films will use modern methods to showcase every Eurovision entry in addition to linking the UK and Ukraine. “We have been commissioned to create the 37 postcards, showcasing each country and their artist ahead of their live performances,” says Windfall Films’ head of manufacturing Maria French.

This isn’t easy. “Including the UK, Ukraine and each Eurovision country in a 48-second postcard is ambitious and challenging, but made even more so by filming in a warzone, directing crews remotely, using 360° cameras and doing it all 37 times over,” French explains.

Technology is making the method simpler. “The ability to communicate so freely, with emails, WhatsApp, phone calls using VoIP technology and video calls has made sharing the creative and learning about each country and their artist so much easier than it might have been,” French says. “Technology is threaded throughout the postcards’ production, from initial points of contact to remote direction on shoots, to upload and footage transfer from location, to the edit without time being spent shipping drives and hoping that they don’t get delayed in customs.”

This 12 months’s postcards rely closely on the newest 360° cameras, which are actually sufficiently small to mount on regular drones. “With this technology we can gather a completely different kind of footage and manipulate it in a completely new way in post-production,” French says.

“Using these cameras allows us to borrow the language of exciting transitions and techniques used in social media and bring them to a broadcast format.”

By bringing all these consultants and applied sciences collectively, O’Brien is assured that this 12 months’s Eurovision Song Contest can be higher than ever earlier than. “All of the people and companies involved bring innovation to the Contest and allow it to evolve each year,” he says. “Having labored on the Olympic and Commonwealth Games earlier than, it’s thoughts blowing to assume that the Eurovision Song Contest occurs each single 12 months and every year it’s greater and higher than the 12 months earlier than.

“We are so proud to be hosting the contest on behalf of Ukraine this year, and we really look forward to delivering a set of shows that are truly ‘United by Music’.”