The Beijing Summer 2008 Olympics may have been destined to be controversial, and it didn’t take long for the Games to spark public debate. One of the earliest flashpoints centered on what took place — and didn’t — during the opening seconds of the opening ceremony. Leading up to the dramatic, drummed countdown at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, viewers at home and on giant screens inside the National Stadium, aka the Bird’s Nest, watched as 29 giant footprints outlined in fireworks proceeded gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square to the 29th Olympiad. What viewers did not realize was that what they were watching was in fact a 55-second-long computer graphics program, over a year in the making by Chinese SFX house Crystal Stone, which went so far as to digitally mimic both the mechanical vibration of the helicopter supposedly filming the event and the halo effect created by the city’s infamous pollution haze, and then inserted into the coverage digitally at exactly the right moments.
Ostensibly, the reason for the digital enhancement was to keep the helicopter at a safe distance from the real pyrotechnics, which were designed by Cai Guo-Qiang, who teamed up with pyro expert Phil Grucci to create the footsteps and smiley faces exploding over Beijing. To do that, the event had to purposely but benignly deceive viewers, which they did marvelously. The head of the special effects team for the ceremony told reporters how pleased he was that viewers thought it was all captured live.
It was hardly a pyrotechnical sham on the scale of Milli Vanilli — there were subtle clues given on camera by Bob Costas and Matt Lauer (not that anyone was listening), enough to give NBC plausible deniability when the blogs brought it to everyone’s attention to the ruse within hours. But what this intersection of live pyro and digital effects brings to the fore is the progressive convergence of real-time and processed effects.
David Grill, taking a moment away from lighting up the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last August, says he observed a heightened convergence effect last year when he worked on the Pan Am Games in Rio de Janeiro. “I look at pyro as another layer,” he says, noting that he has integrated pyro shells to create ambiences for lighting effects. “The smoke allows the shafts of light to be seen, not just the target of the light. And properly coordinated shell explosions are a way to turn the page in a lighting design, to indicate to an audience that the show is about to go to another place, another level, and re-direct their attention.”
That kind of integration requires a high degree of coordination, something that pyro designers can now use to keep fireworks on the beat. “The creative director can look at the music and has the technology, through MIDI or SMPTE time code, to coordinate all of the visual elements — lighting, projection and pyro — with the code. So the interaction between all of these systems designers is on the increase lately.”
What the Chinese broadcasters brought to the opening ceremony was all that plus a new layer — digital video FX — laid over an already complex pyro/lighting/projection proposition. But this wasn’t postproduction, where technicians and designers have the luxury (albeit a slight one) of being able to take another pass at a scene. This was more like FX on the fly, tweaking preprogrammed effects to accommodate the minor meteorological changes that wind and humidity would have on the actual pyro. The overall effect was one of having been pleasantly hoodwinked, the same as you might feel coming out of well-done carnival spook house.
The Chinese, who invented black powder, showed how multiple layers of an event — in this case, pyro, lighting, projection, prerecorded and live music and real-time digital video FX — could converge through skillful coordination. “And that’s the way it has to be when you’re going to use that level of brightness in an event,” says Grill. “Without coordination and an understanding of what each type of illumination can achieve, you risk having pyro blow the video or the lighting out of the water. In order to get the nuances in, I think pyro has to be looked at as an extension of lighting.”
With 2,343 DMX-controlled fixtures in use, the opening ceremony had plenty of luminous firepower. For the video system, High End Systems provided 120 Axon media servers that were controlled by six Wholehog 3 consoles using 37 universes of DMX. All the Axons were networked and used the network media synchronization in High End’s current v1.4.0 software. The ring around the inside of the top of the stadium was lit by 86 Christie Roadster S+20K projectors outfitted with High End Systems Orbital Heads, and an additional 63 Christie CP2000-ZX Cinema projectors were used without mirrors. It was the largest media server show ever attempted and also the world record for the largest HD video projection at 492 meters long by 14 meters high. (Credit where it’s due: Dennis Gardner did programming and Scott Chmielewski did system design. The video system was under the creative direction of Andree Verleger.)
Pyrotechnical designer Eric Tucker, who worked on the Pan Am Games with Grill, says a lot of progress has been made in the last decade in terms of coordinating lighting, pyro, projection and digital enhancements. Aerial events can achieve synchronization as tight as 10 frames — a third of a second in video — and a fraction of a frame with rooftop displays, making integration with broadcast and projection that much more feasible, and spectacular. Some pyro devices can even be fitted with microprocessors. But, he emphasizes, making all of these creative crafts converge successfully is less about what they can do and more about making sure that everyone involved understands the limitations of everyone else’s technologies.
“It has been done before, but Beijing was where it’s been done the best, so far,” he says, in terms of integrating all of those specialties. “Lighting designers know they can’t backlight pyro, and you have to be careful to not overstep the boundaries with smoke, color and luminosity and so on. There are hundreds of things each creative craftsperson has to know and keep in mind about the other crafts. And they all have to hold back a bit when working all together. That’s why Beijing was so spectacular — everything was done in proportion to the other media. When it’s done right, it can be amazing.”
