It has come to light that the feed shown to the people inside the stadium, of firework footprints walking towards the stadium was faked and pre-recorded.
You only have to give this a moments thought to realize that actually this makes a lot of sense.
Why go to the expense of actually reproducing foot shapes in the sky with real fireworks in locations outside the stadium, when the people inside the stadium are only going to see them on a screen anyway! It makes a lot more sense to show them an illusion.
And I think they more than made up for it (if there’s anything to make up for) by the things happening inside the stadium which seemed illusory but weren’t!
I DVR’d the opening ceremonies and I actually remember them saying they were computer generated while they were being shown.
If anybody thought they were real they must not have been listening to the host/mc/broadcaster/whatever-you-call-him.
They were absolutely, absolutely beautiful. I don’t mind one whit that they were pre-recorded, as they were seamless with the rest of the presentation.
I heard that they did send up fireworks just like the ones they CG’d, but since they didn’t want to (a) take the chance that the synchronisation wasn’t going to work, and (b) didn’t want to spend the money necessary to set up a live aerial camera set-up to successfully track each successive footprint pass, they resorted to the pre-viz version for broadcast and for the stadium.
More opening ceremony shenanigans. Nothing very unusual as Hollywood did it a lot back in the day, just look at Marni Nixon, but it still sucks to be the non-perfect kid with the great voice.
Not sure how relevant this is here, one of the BBC commentators said “This is one thing that communism does well” (Paraphrased)
edit: I still haven’t finished watching the OS on iplayer in its entirety.
I can only imagine what this looked like on TV. All I’ve seen were unaltered photos of the fireworks and they were pretty stunning.
Is either of these stories, together or in aggregate, a big deal? No. Performances of the Star Spangled Banner are supposedly dubbed all the time. But I’m glad it’s getting attention beyond the ceremony because these things are obviously part of the Chinese government’s efforts to impress the Chinese people with their amazing and flawless display of competence and power - and if people find out they’re faking parts of it, that’s a good thing.
Sounds like some members of the press are making much ado about nothing at all to piss on someone’s Olympic parade. Lip syncing young girls and cgi’d footprint fireworks? Oh no! That’s surely an international incident of some major concern there.
There are plenty of legitimate gripes about China but nitpicking technical details on an opening ceremony that were completely announced as having some pre-recorded moments (footprints) is pure nonsense.
So far the press is 0 and 3 for me. The underage scandal, fireworks, and lip syncing is really grasping for straws. The underage scandal is the most legitimate concern out of everything but they still need to cough up firm evidence and or an official investigation by the IOC for me to believe any of it off hand.