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3 billion People watching around the world.

204 Flag bearers.

1 Flag bearers making a political statement.

90 'International dignitaries'.

30 Wheelchairs for spectators.

9,000 Members of the People's Liberation Army hitting golden drum caskets on the stadium floor.

1 Number of seconds before the first collective 'oooooh!'

4 Hours the show lasted.

2,488 Volunteers in the stadium.

91,000 Other people in the stadium.

26 Waiting ambulances.

62.5 The claimed percentage of the humidity.

2 The number of eyeballs I've got that I swear were sweating.

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I thought the whole thing was pretty damn good!

I loved the drums at the very start (2008 people banging!) and the fireworks around the city looked fantastic from the air.

 

Only down point was that I had to stay up right to the end to see Australia come out!

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Loved it. Getting around Honkers today, I met a few locals beaming with pride and probably fair enough too. The whole show really was something pretty special.

 

Would have been nice to see some Mao inspired Red Guards smashing a lot of the historical and cultural icons, you know, just to round off the Chinese history lesson, but I guess time constraints and all that. wink

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Aye great show. They had Scotland the Brave playing at one point, but I presume it must be a double use of the same tune. A bit like Deutschland Uber Alles and that hymn we had at school.

 

I don't think there are enough electricians in Britain to do that kind of lighting in 2012!

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Yeh that was really awesome, especially the digital/pixels bit at the start. I heard it cost 24 billion pounds though.

 

I'm glad I'm not in London anymore, having my taxes going into that. Having said that, I might be moving to Kobe where there residents have to a pay a fair % of their city tax for the airport no-one wanted or uses. (did you know kobe had an airport? yep thats right, and its about 10km from kansai kix).

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Some people expressing shock over some of the fireworks near the beginning being exposed as cgi. Er, I could tell when I watched it! (Me just dead clever or anyone else feel it looked cgi-ish).

 

Great spectacle though.

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this:

 

Was it real? Was it faked? Does it matter? Chinese netizens are debating the computer simulated special effects used for one of high points of the Olympic opening ceremony, the footprints of fire that "stepped" from Tiananmen Square to the Bird's Nest stadium.

 

Although the procession of fireworks actually took place, it was deemed too difficult and dangerous to film, so billions of viewers were treated instead to a computer-generated film of what it might look like.

 

Many of those watching were unaware that the effect was expensively "faked" until the Beijing Times reported the following day that only the last of the 29 footprints was actually filmed during the live broadcast.

 

The newspaper revealed that Crystal Stone - a local production company - had spent almost a year creating the 55-second sequence for the other 28 steps, including efforts to capture the slight shake of a camera on a helicopter and the blurring effect of haze.

 

Olympic organisers said the decision was necessary for safety reasons, because a helicopter might have been vulnerable to all the fireworks let off that night and it would have been hard to capture the entire route from a single location.

 

Gao Xiaolong, the head of the visual effects team for the ceremony, told the paper that the final result was not perfect, but achieved the desired effect: "Most of the audience thought it was filmed live - so that was mission accomplished."

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well they fooled me. but i think they could have done it live by flying a little higher. if you are gonna use cgi, why not put dinasours fighting flying monks in there too?

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Originally Posted By: Curt
It was a Scottish pipe band wasn't it? I think they had a number of bands taking it in turns as the athletes walked in.

Anyway, very impressive.


Yep it was a pipe band from my home city! I was a little shocked to hear all the scottish favourites being belted out but I was more shocked when I found out it was from an amatuer band from my home town!
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