Since over 65 years the Eurovision Song Contest has been resembling a truly superlative event and even to date regularly breaks records with its extravagant shows and performances, reaching up to 180 million viewers worldwide every year. Following this tradition, the 2023 edition of the ESC, which was held between the 9th and 13th of May in Liverpool, UK, on behalf of the Ukraine presented 37 countries and their special delegations, performing breathtaking musical performances accompanied by a one-of-a-kind lighting show.
With the BBC as client, this year's Eurovision lighting design was done by none other than the team around Tim Routledge, winner of multiple TPi Awards, who relied on Syncronorm's multimedia show design and visualization software Depence R3 for the pre-programming of the entire project. Together with his team including associates James Scott, Morgan Evans, Alex Mildenhall, Mark Nicholson, and Tom Young, who were responsible for different aspects of the pre-programming and Depence project, Routledge created over 37 shows, including intros and interlude performances in an amazingly short time.
The preprogramming took place at Neg Earth Lights in London, where the team around Routledge has built a Depence machine especially for this demanding project, running the latest release of the software namely Depence 3.1. In this way the team could rely on the newest features and performance boosts, some of which were developed simultaneously to the ongoing project to make the ESC pre-programming possible. In addition to the Depence visualization the team utilized three GrandMA consoles for the programming process, which were connected via VizKey technology to Depence to enable a flawless, fast, and stable workflow.
For this year, a visualization teaser was created for the first time for the ESC, which was also broadcast by the BBC. Responsible for this Depence visualization was Morgan Evans. The teaser should already give an impression about the design of the stage and the general mood in advance. Thereby, not only generic fixtures were considered but the entire rig, e.g., all kinetic and moving elements, extras like LED tape or prop extras of all delegations. Depence R3 has made the visualization of some special features possible, which cannot be found in any other visualizer. For example, some shows of different delegations required the so-called Star Filter effect on the cameras, which could also be implemented in Depence to create the most realistic image of the different scenes. During pre-programming, over 3000 fixtures with tens of thousands of individual LEDs on more than 300 DMX universes were used, which were also placed in Depence, and which could be visualized without any problem at all. The team also worked very closely with Syncronorm to keep all fixture characteristics and profiles as close to the real devices as possible to ensure the most accurate pre-production.
Read the full story of Syncronorm's involvement with even more information in the latest issue of TPi magazine here.
