From an early age, Nicoline Refsing was driven to create experiences that inspire audiences. During an expansive career, she has excelled in the creative direction and production design for some of the world’s most legendary sold-out stadium tours, amazing award shows and big brand launch events. The Danish ‘Queen of Eurovision’ sits down with LIVE to share her story and insights into her own company, Rockart Design.
Can you take us through your career history up until now?
I attended a fine art school in Denmark where I studied spacious design, which is a subject that sits in-between interior and architecture, but with a particularly artistic approach towards how we can understand and communicate in space and spacious relations.
During these studies, I was introduced to production design through Val Strazovec.
One of my teachers had studied under him, and I completely understood his theories and approach to production design.
After my first year, I was lucky to have been invited to do some rather large productions, in some big venues in Denmark.
I come from a musical family – there was always music on in the background.
I’ve also been to a lot of gigs; I went to see the Bridges to Babylon tour by the Rolling Stones – a huge stadium show involving a hydraulic bridge going from the A-stage to the B-stage without support.
It was absolutely phenomenal and I decided then and there it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
During the time where I was working on my graduate project, I helped create the design for a rock concert under Mark Fisher.
One of my teachers came in one day and said, ‘you do realise he’s the guy who designed the big Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones tours that you’ve been to?’. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to work for this guy’.
I graduated and started to learn more about Mark Fisher and studied every show he had ever done.
I thought about how I could work up from being relatively newly graduated and take that leap to work at the highest international level possible.
I remember seeing a documentary from a leading fashion designer, who was talking about all these young people coming to him for work and how he couldn’t just afford to give them a job, but if they had the money themselves, he could at least give them experience.
I realised this was what I needed to do to get started.
Eventually, I managed to fundraise enough together to ask Mark if I could be his apprentice.
I ended up travelling around with Mark for half a year.
We went to Las Vegas and I worked with him on the big Cirque du Soleil show. I was also with him for the Brit Awards. It truly was the best time of my life.
Then, one day, he came to me and said, ‘You know what? If I give you a week to go back to Denmark and pack all your things, can I put you on payroll?’
I worked with Mark for over six years. I was the third designer to join the company – it was a very little studio at that time.
Being able to work with Mark, Ray and Adrian (who was the leading animator) and learn their skills was such a privilege.
Every day was a fantastic journey – so inspiring and exciting. Back then, I was designing for the Brit Awards, National Television Awards, Take That and Pink, among lots of other music shows. But I always wanted to have my own business; that was my end game.
In 2011, I set out to start my own business. In the last couple of years with Mark, I had been doing more and more creative direction, despite the fact my background was in production design.
I felt there needed to be a more holistic approach to shows, where there could be more dialogue about how the screens are laid out.
I was interested in learning not just how to create a set, but also screen designs that work with the set – and how we could extend the design – so we didn’t know where the border between stage and screen was.
Could you discuss one of the most technically challenging projects you’ve ever worked on?
One of the more interesting and particularly challenging projects was Eurovision back in 2014.
I was the creative director and content producer for all 37 delegations that year and we became involved quite late in the process.
Part of my contract was to visualise what would happen with the design – as we do that well in our studio.
We had a 100m LED screen in the back and an interactive LED floor. Between that there was a transparent projection screen and if you sent an electric current through it, it closed.
Then there was a big 3D grid, which effectively was a 3D LED installation. I believe that was the winner of the show.
I worked closely with Chris Plant for this, who specialises in 3D installation work.
Each element presented its own challenges, but to make them all work together was even more difficult.
The projection gave us another technical challenge in that it wasn’t a projection surface, so there was nowhere near enough light reflecting from it to give us the lighting levels we wanted.
That year, we created every single country’s stage design, making it the hardest job I’ve ever done by myself at that point. In the end, that year brought in almost 200 million viewers.
Can you tell us more about your company, Rockart Design?
We work both in creative direction and design, as well as the show direction space – and we’ve sort of fused the two together.
I began by doing what I have always done: music and entertainment shows as well as award shows.
Then, suddenly, I got a call from an esports company.
I said: ‘Why are you calling me? I don’t know anything about esports.’ To which they replied: ‘No, but you know how to create award shows and big live experiences.’
So now our client base is a lot wider than it used to be. Working with these big esports projects presents different challenges.
You want to give a live experience which can emulate the gaming universe that people are used to from sitting in their rooms at home.
I’ve also been working with big event companies like Jack Morton, where I worked on a Samsung launch as show director in New York.
Moving from music into the agencies and seeing that there was a whole other talent mass has just been amazing.
I also love that work because I suppose rock ’n’ roll is a little bit more entrepreneurial: you just work as fast as you can to solve each problem.
What is the process your team goes through when starting a new project?
Usually, it’s about having a meeting, understanding exactly what’s required and making sure that we are the very best people for the job.
These days, the process is so short. You literally get the phone call and expect to start work on it the next day.
My work is very visual contracts based, which means we will start with learning exactly what the client wants to say and mirroring that back in terms of mood boards and concept stories, developing a common understanding of what we are creating before moving to the next step.
We work in 3D – everything is drawn in AutoCAD 3D and animated 3D. As you can probably see, the renders are a big part of what we do and how we work.
The renders are not just pretty Photoshop collages, but actual 3D, so they can be as precise as possible.
With CAD drawings, I aim to highlight where the problems are. All these discussions and little issues are so much easier to have before you go out on site – and a lot cheaper!
Avoiding problems on site, where time is extremely limited, makes the pre-production key – and is where we are strong in catching all the problems.
When I worked with Mark, we always said that, if anything needed to be changed on site, then we’ve not done a very good job.
You have been referred to as the ‘Queen of Eurovision’. Could you share your Eurovision experience?
Since 2014, I’ve been lucky enough to work with many delegations where they’ve come to me to deliver their performance on the show.
There are three performances in particular that I’m incredibly proud of.
One is Latvia from 2015, which turned out to be an absolutely stunning show.
It didn’t rate anywhere prior to the broadcast, which made it a project where I realised how much power the visuals have.
After the first rehearsal, she went straight to the top. It was one of those projects where everything just aligned.
Also, there was Australia from 2016 in Stockholm, where they nearly won.
Dami Im was so fantastic to work with and she worked so hard. As a Korean-Norwegian representing Australia in Eurovision – there were just so many steps that she leaped over to get there.
From every performance, she just got better and better. In terms of AV, that was a really challenging performance because they were introducing a brand-new kind of projection netting.
The performance was about social media and how the conflict between things are so connected in the virtual world that you are really lonely in your own private real world.
That led us to have a lot of discussions about what social media would look like in the future.
Paul Clark, who’s the head of the delegation of Australia and also a creative director, wanted to create a Blade Runner theme.
When you look at the performance, you get that feel of her being in the future, and she was moving the content around with her hands on the projection, which she couldn’t see.
Technically, that performance was really difficult – even I didn’t think we’d get through it at one point.
And from Junior Eurovision, there was Melani from Spain in 2019.
Her performance was mind-blowing – that girl is so talented. For that performance, that set-up was simple because it had the LED screen in the back with her in the front – and we started with a reverse shot.
The song was about stopping the pollution of our oceans for young people.
I created the performance with some beautiful plastic debris entangled in fishing nets, which caused a bit of a challenge to the production.
We had a chat about it and I told them all they had to do was cover it with black felt so it doesn’t get tangled when rolling it out – and it worked! We got there in the end.
The performance looked incredibly beautiful in the end; the content was both imaginative and playful and I thought that it fit the performance very well.
What is your favourite project you’ve ever worked on and why?
The one that stands out to me was the Pink Funhouse tour in 2009-2010.
It was when I was working with Mark in the studio in London and he was doing the client-facing meetings with my material. I had seen all her other shows and thought she was so powerful.
I knew that, if her show ever landed on my desk, I would create something so strong to support her concepts in one because she had so many incredibly moving stories to tell.
I was so lucky I had the opportunity to design it and even luckier that it was the fantastic Funhouse album.
We had the title, we had the theme, and I think that defined her live shows.
I love working closely with artists to make sure we give them a unique identity they can connect with and the audience can connect with.
Spending time to research and figure out who they are, how they perform best on stage and how to translate that into the visuals – creating something that works with their identity and the audience can connect to that authenticity.
This is some of my favourite work as I get in so deep with it.
Printing was becoming so good at the time of the Funhouse tour, we actually redesigned all the patterns on the set in the studio and had them printed rather than theatrically painted. It just gave the whole set a richness and colourfulness.
The backdrops were designed with various companies who would create such spectacular textual designs.
It of course helped that we also had an extraordinary screen content team that worked with and built upon our ideas. We had amazing lighting and costume designers as well!
Which of the industries you work across do you find the most exciting and why?
Music is where my heart and soul is, but I’m always excited about any project.
I very easily get passionate about any kind of project because there’s always something unique, and that is what I’m always trying to find.
The most boring briefs I get are when somebody comes in with a reference – from the Oscars for example – and says ‘we want something similar to the Oscars, but not the Oscars’.
I try to say that you’re never going to be the Oscars, and what you want to be is your own thing. That’s when your brand is strongest, when you find your own identity.
I also care greatly about maintaining the live experience because that is something we felt the loss of during the pandemic.
When you miss out on the live part of a show, you miss the validation that makes it a true, authentic performance.
The moment where you spot that person in the crowd with tears in their eyes because they’re visually so touched by what’s happening live on stage; the viewers at home can then also feel that on the other side of the screen.
Feeling live elements makes any production touching and authentic – and that validates us. So I always try to think of ways to include a live audience close to the stage.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt in your career that you feel could help others?
I always say that you need to know your stuff, you need to do the research and make a good network of people who you can call up when you want to know about new things, or learn how to do something.
Everything is possible. It’s purely a matter of time and money and teamwork.
But the key is to not give up, and know that everything is possible in one way or another.
To learn more about Refsing and Rockart Design’s work, head to rockartdesign.com
This feature was first published in the Summer 2024 issue of LIVE.
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