The first steps to start building Malmö Arena in preparation for the Eurovision Song Contest shows in May have been taken this week.

The man responsible for the technical side of things for this year’s host broadcaster Swedish Television SVT, Ola Melzig, has already established his office in Malmö Arena.

There will yet be a sporting event before the teams can get into the real work of installing the lighting and anything else that won’t be in the way for the last remaining show in the Arena, with British comedian Eddie Izzard.

On 17 April, Melzig’s team will only have a couple of days to finalise the installations ahead of programming of the lighting system.

While the lights will be programmed during the nights, rest of the production equipment will be installed during the days.

Technical Director Ola Melzig has been involved in most of the recent Eurovision Song Contest productions.

He says that the level of ambition this year puts very high demands on the technical team.

In Moscow 2009 we had three and a half weeks to do the same amount of work we now have to do in a week, he tells svt.se.

And then we’ll have around 60 hours to dismantle the whole installation, says Melzig. It seems very generous, as in Helsinki in 2007 we only had 30 hours to take down almost as big a stage installation, he reminisces.

The technical team is very international, in perfect keeping with the We are one – slogan of the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest. The stage is made in Belgium, the lights come from Germany, says Melzig. The sound installation is from Norway, and sound production is Belgian. We have brought in camera technology from Ukraine, and media servers and the likes from Finland, the UK and Germany.

You can follow the progress of the setup in the blog of Technical Director Ola Melzig, The Eurovision Diary. 

Watch a video report by Malmö newspaper Sydsvenskan below:

To get in the mood for May watch a video prepared by The City of Malmö here