How Rio got super-smart — FT.com: There was another factor, however, that made the ceremony so memorable: it delivered spectacular digital visual effects, producing an immersive experience akin to sitting inside the Matrix or Insurgent movies. Over the course of several hours, a breathless kaleidoscope of computer images was beamed on to the walls and floor of the stadium, creating worlds of urban skyscrapers, seascapes and jungle scenes.
The net result was an experience as visually thrilling and emotionally powerful as anything I saw in the London 2012 opening ceremony (which I was lucky enough to attend) or Beijing’s, in 2008 (which I watched on television) — so much so that when the athletes finally stepped into the area, it was almost an anticlimax.
In many ways, this is no surprise: most large events use computer projections these days. London 2012, for example, employed dazzling lighting. But the fact that digitisation now dominates the Olympic opening ceremony is a symbol of how our 21st-century world is changing.
When I was a student, I was heavily involved in set design: I spent almost every spare minute inside theatre workshops, sawing wood, painting pieces of cloth and assembling scaffolding. It was a messy, physical job and my ambitions were constantly frustrated by gravity or the cost of moving scaffolding. At the Brazil event, the designers were liberated from gravity — the hard “work” was done with light beams and a computer mouse, not scaffolding. It was as if the set designers had been given cyber wings: they could switch scenes with a flexibility I could never have dreamt of — and at a far lower cost.
This partly reflected an artistic choice: Fernando Meirelles, the lead designer, is a renowned film-maker. It was also driven by expediency: the crisis-plagued government of Brazil was under pressure to keep costs down (and the budget for the Rio ceremony was reportedly less than half the �27m spent in London, and a small fraction of that spent in Beijing). But the key point is this: digitisation is giving designers more bang for their artistic buck; even — or especially — in cash-strapped emerging market nations such as Brazil.
The net result was an experience as visually thrilling and emotionally powerful as anything I saw in the London 2012 opening ceremony (which I was lucky enough to attend) or Beijing’s, in 2008 (which I watched on television) — so much so that when the athletes finally stepped into the area, it was almost an anticlimax.
In many ways, this is no surprise: most large events use computer projections these days. London 2012, for example, employed dazzling lighting. But the fact that digitisation now dominates the Olympic opening ceremony is a symbol of how our 21st-century world is changing.
When I was a student, I was heavily involved in set design: I spent almost every spare minute inside theatre workshops, sawing wood, painting pieces of cloth and assembling scaffolding. It was a messy, physical job and my ambitions were constantly frustrated by gravity or the cost of moving scaffolding. At the Brazil event, the designers were liberated from gravity — the hard “work” was done with light beams and a computer mouse, not scaffolding. It was as if the set designers had been given cyber wings: they could switch scenes with a flexibility I could never have dreamt of — and at a far lower cost.
This partly reflected an artistic choice: Fernando Meirelles, the lead designer, is a renowned film-maker. It was also driven by expediency: the crisis-plagued government of Brazil was under pressure to keep costs down (and the budget for the Rio ceremony was reportedly less than half the �27m spent in London, and a small fraction of that spent in Beijing). But the key point is this: digitisation is giving designers more bang for their artistic buck; even — or especially — in cash-strapped emerging market nations such as Brazil.