The 2015 Spring Festival Gala may reduce LED usage while still advocating "frugal Spring Festival Gala"

The preparation for the 2015 Year of the Sheep Spring Festival Gala may be the most veiled one in recent years. The "CCTV Year of the Sheep Spring Festival Gala" symposium held on October 26 was the first to speak out for this year's gala, and the only substantive content revealed to the outside world at this symposium was — "frugal Spring Festival Gala."

This is not the first time CCTV has proposed the concept of frugality. Last year, the Spring Festival Gala directed by Feng Xiaogang changed the luxurious style of previous editions, removing the LED stage that extended to the audience seating at the Year of the Snake Gala, adopting a return-to-simplicity approach, even placing a large red lantern hanging high at the top of the stage. Such low-key stage design has been absent from the Spring Festival Gala for many years. The Year of the Horse Gala has already been cut back to this extent. Can the Year of the Sheep Gala still be cut further?

After the symposium, we contacted the media company that has served the Spring Festival Gala stage design over the years. They admitted: "This year's Spring Festival Gala budget hasn't been released yet. The station's tone suggests it should be the most frugal one in history. The stage design will focus on choreography on the existing basis, and we probably won't be buying anything new!"

The 2003 Spring Festival Gala once heavily promoted that the host's costume material was the expensive Yunjin (cloud brocade). Such grandeur is unlikely to appear again in recent years. As the saying goes, "before the troops move, provisions go first." Although the director of the Spring Festival Gala had not yet been confirmed, the notice of frugality has already been communicated to relevant departments and partners. As for how to be frugal with costumes and props, the thousand-year wisdom of the Chinese nation has already told us: "new for three years, old for three years, mending and patching for another three years."

The Spring Festival Gala has been running for over thirty years, with countless props used over the years. Coupled with CCTV being the venue for large variety show galas, the costume and props department must have a substantial inventory. The Spring Festival Gala has many programs and difficult choreography, but there are patterns to it — for example, ethnic group song-and-dance celebrations, Peking opera, and other programs are fixed items, and these programs do not vary much in terms of costumes. Year after year, the flowers look alike, and last year's costumes can be fully reused.

As for skit props, after LED became prevalent, the Spring Festival Gala skits almost no longer use physical props, but instead turn to using large LED screens as backdrops.

Before Feng Xiaogang, several editions of the Spring Festival Gala led by Ha Wen had already pushed stage design to the extreme. Especially for the Year of the Snake Spring Festival Gala, to extend the stage, some audience seats were even removed, extending the stage into the area below the audience. That year's Gala used a total of 304 LED screens, which could not only present 360-degree images but also featured water-curtain holographic projections. It is reported that CCTV's Spring Festival Gala stage alone cost more than 300 million yuan that year. Since last year's Gala, Feng Xiaogang has taken the opposite approach—abandoning the ceiling and the LEDs that extended into the audience, replacing them with bright red lanterns, not any high-tech gadget, apparently actively responding to the 'austerity order' issued by five ministries. Big red lanterns hanging high, very festive indeed.

We interviewed a person engaged in stage design work, who said that LED manufacturing is costly, and installation and debugging fees are also very high. Moreover, as the Spring Festival Gala stage design is an integrated whole, the LED screens in various areas impose strict requirements on video production. Coupled with CCTV's live broadcast requirements, not a single broken screen or temporary glitch can occur on site. Therefore, once extensive use of LED is determined, it will undoubtedly be the absolute major portion of the stage design expenditure.