Eurovision Song Contest 2023

NorthHouse brought everything they had to the table to provide visuals for each country at this year’s unforgettable Eurovision Song Contest.

In November 2022, The BBC asked NorthHouse to create broadcast graphics, screen branding, and performance visuals for the opening and interval acts of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, hosted by the UK in Liverpool on behalf of Ukraine. Their work encompassed scoreboard graphics, postcard transitions, and branded screen holding visuals.

The NorthHouse team wanted to ensure that this would be the biggest and best Eurovision and set out to distinguish it significantly from past contests with a highly unique look and feel. They worked closely with Lee Smithhurst, Dan Shipton, Tom Denning, and German Nenov to bring their ideas to life. They spent ample time meticulously brainstorming and designing before going into any practical production.

The creative team used Photoshop for initial style frames, Cinema 4D for CGI elements, and After Effects for 2D animation and final compositing. They primarily used Notch as a real-time content generator, creating assets such as particles and motion graphics elements that they could composite into an overall edit for each track within After Effects. Notch helped immensely with previsualisation, providing high-quality, accurate representations without sacrificing rendering time.

For the “Music of Ukraine” performance, the team used Notch to create portraits of famous Ukrainian musicians made of particles laid over the last feed to appear as augmented-reality elements. This year’s contest broke broadcast records, reaching 162 million viewers, and TimeOut’s review labelled it “richer, more diverse and more interesting than any other edition in recent memory.”

“With a bold and fantastic stage design comes a challenging amount of pixels to fill. Using Notch to generate visuals gave us a fast pass when it came to rendering bespoke assets.”

Tom Bairstow, Founder & Creative Director, NorthHouse

Additional press coverage:
TimeOut, The Independent, Varsity, i Newspaper.

Credits
Client: BBC Studios
Broadcast Graphics, Onscreen Branding, & Guest Performance Visuals: NorthHouse
NorthHouse Team:
(In alphabetical order)
Tom Bairstow
Alice Best
Lydia Caplan
Laura Clark
Dale Croft

Emile Freeman
Henrique Ghersi
Liam Gilheany
Aaron Honda
Ash Kayser
Florian Lecoq
Alessio Monaco
Dan Richards
Alice Ryland
Duncan Tune
Dan Wise