Part of Olympics Fireworks Display Faked
By Samuel Spencer

One of the key parts of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, watched by over an estimated 3 billion people around the world, was faked, a report in a Chinese newspaper has revealed.

A part of the ceremony broadcast on TV, which seemed to display giant footprints in the sky lit up by fireworks, were a computer animation that had been prepared for more than a year.

The setup was so elaborate and well planned that even giant television screens inside the stadium broadcast the fake images.

The faked animation was revealed in The Beijing Times in an interview with the head of the ceremony’s visual effects, Gao Xiaolong. Despite the subterfuge, Gao said he was pleased with the results. “Most of the audience thought it was being shown live, so that was mission accomplished,” he said in the interview.

Gao said it had taken his team a year to create the 55-second sequence.

Gao revealed that it would have been impossible to film the footage live, given the smog and the weather, and would have involved carefully maneuvering a helicopter to see all 29 footsteps in a row.

The team talked to the Beijing meteorological office so as to recreate the haze from Beijing’s night sky, and also inserted a camera-shake effect to make it appear as if it was filmed from a helicopter.

The dupe was made possible by the fact that it was done under the aegis of the Beijing Olympic Broadcasting, which controls and provides the main video feeds of all Olympics events to other channels, which in turn feed the video to all around the world. This includes NBC, which has the U.S. broadcasting contract.

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