Olympic Mistakes

Just days after everyone in the world called the opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics, the most spectacular show ever put up, it is being taken down one notch at a time each and every day. So, as much as I was impressed by the opening ceremony, I am no longer impressed with it anymore. Personally, I think that the director missed the memo that told him that he was directing a live show, and not a hollywood blockbuster.

1. It has emerged that the cute little girl who sang the song at the beginning of the ceremony, merely lip synced. I noticed this during the ceremony itself, but I didn’t think too much of it because lip-syncing was a pretty normal practice for grand events. But in this case, I did not find it acceptable that she lip-synced to the song sung by another little girl, who was apparently dropped because she wasn’t cute enough, even though her voice was golden.
2. It has also been discovered that part of the out door fireworks display was computer graphics. The decision was made to render the sequence in advance because they realised that it would be impossible to capture the entire sequence live. While this would be perfectly acceptable in a movie, doing it for a live show is very wrong.

On another note, it has also appeared that some of the computers used to project images for the opening ceremony, crashed during the ceremony. Many people had captured the classic Blue Screen of Death appearing in the stadium towards the end of the ceremony, when the flame was about to be lit. I wonder what Bill Gates did when that appeared. He was present for the opening ceremony, afterall.

Personally, I think that the Olympics show was still good, just not great and certainly not as spectacular anymore. If we are going to turn a live show like this into a hollywood movie, then it should be benchmarked against other movies. It certainly cannot compare with LOTR for example. Furthermore, if we continue along this line of show fakery, we will be hiring Pixar to do the opening ceremony by 2020. Where is the fun in that?