At PLASA 2025 in London's Olympia, British Lighting Designer Tim Routledge took the audience on a journey through the design team selection process, designing, planning, and running the Eurovision Song Contest. The show was watched by 166 million viewers in 37 countries, in addition to 6,500 spectators creating the atmosphere in the hall.
Routledge called it "An absolute honor to go back and do Eurovision for another year after living the dream and designing the lighting for Liverpool in 2023. It is truly on the bucket list for a lighting designer." However, he went on, "Just because it is so much fun, doesn't mean that it has an unlimited budget, it doesn’t!"
According to Routledge, the process begins with an invitation to pitch the Eurovision producers. "This year, they approached six different LDs and we each pitched a look, a team, costs for the team including flights, hotels, rentals, and your ethos and your enthusiasm for the project. When we were pitching, we did not know the venue, and that can vary hugely from an expo hall to a more traditional music venue." After the selection process, they chose the St Jakobshalle in Basel.
After making his pitch to the producers through the official portal, Routledge went on a short holiday. Disaster almost struck: "When I got home, I realized that only the cover letter had uploaded to the pitching portal, my file was so big it had timed out! I had 15 minutes left to reupload before the deadline."
The next stage is to pitch to the Eurovision committee for the host country, and while they may be strangers at the beginning, by the end of the process, he says, everyone is a lifelong friend.
Routledge introduced the team, most of which were also with him in Liverpool.
- My associate LD Morgan Evans is responsible for the previz systems.
- James Scott looks after semi final two and I deal with semi final one because there are so many delegations (teams from each participating country). He also looks after automation in the show, pitch and angle. Between us, we design the rig and the rig is VAST.
- Marc Nicholson programmer, and he balances the lighting on every face
- Louisa Smurthwaite was our followspot captain – she manages the 14 followspot operators
- Tom Young – MA programmer. (We have daytime programmers and then we have late night programmers who come in at tea time to carry on making the notes from the delegates.
- Alex Mildenhall as above.
- Sam Lisher screen content producer – it is very hard to keep track of all content from all the delegations and to make sure it is up to date and the right codec. He is on top of that.
- Luke Collins Disguise programmer
- Andy Coates Associate screen content producer
- Emily Malone Disguise programmer
Routledge always aims for a 50% gender diverse team, and at Eurovision they got into the spirit of the event, decorating their room with tinsel and rubber ducks.
Other companies included Neg Earth, the lighting vendor, ER Productions London provided lasers, and LED Creative did all the LED tape and neon. The follow spotters were all from Pro Spot because they are an experienced broadcast entertainment company, and there were three Steadicams experienced at not creating shadows on faces etc.
The set design was chosen next, and the LD is involved in that process to see if it is feasible and how it will reproduce on camera. Routledge says, "The one clear winner with unanimous support was Florian Wieder. He has done many Eurovision sets now and there are so many great looks. His perspective set with mountains and also the memorable Frame gave us so much to work with."
Challenges
According to Routledge, T"he venue is quite small and there are no beams and very few rigging points and in the end we had to get the venue to install permanent hoist trusses for us. But the weight loading was just not strong enough for our rig, so we knew we needed a ground support structure. What Florian did was take a huge practical restriction and turn it into a feature. The Frame is clad all the way around in LED video and has a stage running through it. The truss around it is black clad so you don’t see it, so it functions like a proscenium arch but cameras can fly almost through it and around it. I added a couple of hundred Acme Tornados to it. Each has five heads so that makes a thousand lights we had to program. On Eurovision, you dress everything 360 because a third of the camera shots are in reverse, watching delegates walk down the catwalk.
A huge quantity of the rig lived upstage of the screen, with almost 1000 Acme Pixel Lines forming a 3D grid. We created what we called "Hero squares" made out of 400 GLP X5 Bars and had GLP Creos behind the scenic mountains, JDC1 Strobes on the top and bottom of the stage, and Claypaky Volero Cubes on the stage. All the overhead kinetic trusses (nicknamed Ribs) could move to extreme angles and were painted in a high gloss black. In addition there were more trusses for Ayrton Rivales and Tornados which helped us create a different architecture for each performance.
We were able to send previz to the delegates so they could see what we had done and send notes--I compared our creative throughs in Basel to a Swiss army knife, because we needed something for everyone. Thirty-eight unique looks."
At the back of the grid, Routledge had another rig of more than a hundred Ayrton Domino 3s to use as beams and point sources.
He says, "We didn't do tons of pixel mapping on this project, but we mapped the Pixel Lines on the screen for Iceland and played with the screen transparency for the lighthouse for JJ's winning song for Austria lining up the light coming from the lighthouse on the video screen."
The Cubes took a lot of attention. He explains, "Our gaffer, Keith Duncan, created a 60-page safety booklet for the Cubes. Where they go, which universe they plugged into. It took 10 days to build the entire grid and it was a huge undertaking. All the plans were done in Vectorworks and Keith also works in Vectorworks, so we were all working in one platform making it ten times more efficient."
The truss was pre-rigged before arriving at the hall and had a high gloss black finish as the show is shot in all directions so it is on view. All the moving truss had XYZ data and was timecoded.
The team is able to previz all the looks from London, while the set was being built in Switzerland, and each county's delegates sent notes and make special requests, like the Astera Hydro Panels for Germany, which are paid for by that country.
Two of the follow spot operators were on Followme and could jump onto anyone of 400 fixtures, which could go back and forth between followspot mode and automated lighting easily.