The Beijing Olympics

When BOCOG solicited proposals for the Opening Ceremony production in 2005, I was invited to join a Chinese team assembled by Lu Jiankang’s Beijing Bei-Au Grand Cultural & Sports Events Company. The deadline for proposals was the summer of 2005.

    After the hand-in, things went very quiet. The Chinese judges shortlisted the hundreds of proposals down to 13, and then to three. But in the end they decided that — taken individually — none of the proposals delivered what they were looking for.

    In the summer of 2006, BOCOG appointed Zhang Yimou to be the producer and artistic director of the Ceremonies, assisted by two deputy artistic directors, Zhang Jigang and Chen Weiya who, along with the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, and show directors Fan Yue and Wang Chaoge, comprised the core creative team. Chen Weiya was also appointed artistic director for the Closing Ceremony, and Zhang Jigang was appointed artistic director for the Paralympic Ceremonies.

    At the same time, Yu Jianping, a senior executive at the Beijing Special Equipment Design Institute (BSEDI), became director of the technology group, responsible for all the stage machinery, stadium rigging and the cauldron installation. Lu Jiankang was made production director of the Opening Ceremony, responsible for the performers and stage management. All would have huge teams working under them.

    BOCOG also appointed a slightly larger team of creative directors by cherry picking individuals from all of the teams from their shortlist of non-winning entries. Many of the ideas that had been in the entries of all these different people were retained or folded into what became the final project.

    From the start of the project, Yimou had a clear vision of the sort of show he wanted to create; a poetic show that used wit and intelligence to challenge the scale of the stadium, a modern show that exploited current multi-media techniques, and a mass choreography show that achieved moments of intimacy and emotion.

    As with all Opening Ceremony shows, BOCOG expected the artistic performance to showcase Chinese cultural and technological inventions and achievements. Yimou sought a single theme that could form a unifying thread through the show. He chose paper, because it not only holds an important position in the development of Chinese art, but it also became, from the time of its invention in China in 100AD up until the 20th century, the primary medium of global communication.

    By autumn 2006, Yimou had worked out a show based around the creation of a huge sheet of paper in the stadium. The sheet (in the first proposal it was 26m wide by 36m long) would be used as both a painting ground and a sculptural element. It would be painted on, danced on and projected on, and it would fly like a bird, sail like a ship, and float like a magic carpet above the desert. And it would also be walked on by all the athletes, who, in a remarkable proposal, would print their steps in ink on the paper surface as they walked across it. Beneath the paper, Yimou proposed that the entire infield of the stadium floor was to be a giant LED screen.

    In the winter of 2006, I traveled to Beijing, met with Chen Weiya and Zhang Yimou and accepted their invitation to work with them as ‘Chief Designer’ for the Ceremonies. From January 2007 onwards, I commuted to Beijing at least once a month, and I was present at all the creative meetings where the major design decisions were made.

    The creative team had reshaped the Opening Ceremony show into two parts by May 2007. The first half, ‘Splendid Civilization’ would present 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. The second half, ‘Extraordinary Times’, would summarise the achievements of the present and look forward to the future. BOCOG had chosen the phrase — ‘One World One Dream’ — as the slogan for the Beijing Olympics and Yimou decided that an image of the Earth should be built in the stadium and presented as an aspirational symbol for the future.

    Yimou developed the idea of a giant scroll on the floor of the stadium. The scroll, with rolls at each end that could be opened and closed just like a real scroll, was made from a 2cm thick polyester resin honeycomb sandwich (11m wide x 20m long, weighing 800kg) and became the main stage for the show while the surface of the scroll became a 147m x 22m LED screen across which images could flow like a river of time.

    In the centre of the LED screen, in the centre of the field, Yu Jianping’s team designed a lift, 26m wide in the east-west direction and 36m long in the north-south direction. The lift was covered by two sliding lids each 30m wide x 18m long that opened north and south to reveal the lift pit.

    Both the deck of the lift and the sliding lids were covered with the same LED screen, so that the image on the 147m x 22m screen was uninterrupted regardless of whether the lids were open or closed. The 26m x 36m lift platform descended to a depth of 6m.

    Beneath this main loading level was a second chamber, 20m in diameter and 5.5m deep, designed in anticipation of an effect as yet unknown. Last winter, the engineers went ahead with the construction of the lift pit in the stadium, and with the construction of a rehearsal field in a suburb of Beijing where the flying-fox rigging system could be tested and rehearsed.

    An early sub-title for the Opening Ceremony show was ‘Let’s Walk Together’.  In response to this theme, Cai Guo-Qiang proposed a series of giant pyrotechnic footprints in the sky, marching along the central axis of Beijing from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Park. The final footprint would explode overhead the Bird’s Nest, showering sparks into the stadium where they would fall like stars and ignite the LED screen display of the Olympic rings.

    The creation of the globe was another challenge. It was the only piece of scenery that I personally designed. The creative team needed to find a way of uniting the idea of the globe (One World) with an image of aspiration (One Dream). The technical challenge for each proposal was the same.

    The sphere had to appear as if from nowhere in the second half of the show, be in use for about five minutes, and then disappear cleanly to leave the field clear for the athletes. For visual reasons it needed to be at least 18m in diameter, a dimension that was much larger than the storage space available in the lift pit.

    Although the construction and operation of each globe was different, they all shared a common idea — I believe that the artistic performances of an Olympic Ceremony should embody the same levels of personal risk, skill, effort and endurance that the athletes must deliver when they compete in the games. So my ideas for the various globes all included proposals for athletic artistic performance that would engage acrobats with the sphere, and push them to their limits.

    I designed about half a dozen different spheres in the course of as many months. Finally, out of Yimou rejecting these other ideas came this really clear idea. I left a meeting in June 2007 seeing what we needed to do to get out of the logjam and I built an AutoCAD model for it on the nine hour flight back from Beijing. By the end of the week we had sent back a DVD with Adrian Mudd’s animation of the whole thing.

    The sphere was made up from nine latitudinal rings, with a performance position for a group of singers at the north pole. The rings were structural trusses that functioned as running and rigging tracks for up to 60 performers who could run around them, always with their feet pointing inwards, towards the centre of the globe.

    The image I wanted to create was of the performers being weightless as they ran on the surface of the sphere. The rigging was arranged to allow the performers to run, to leap, to turn somersaults and, at the lower latitudes, to fly around the sphere. The rings were also designed so that they would pack down into a space only 5m high. The sphere was lifted from its north pole by a telescoping mast. In my original design the mast was 30m high, but for economic reasons the mast was later shortened to 24m. In the original design the negative space between the rings was left open, making the sphere a transparent, multi-layered sculptural object.

    Nobody has done what we did on the sphere before, and I think the novelty of the performance was the major attraction for the Chinese. The engineering was heroic but straightforward. The big challenge for the Chinese was creating the structure and the performance simultaneously. They had never built something original that was so large and where it was necessary to develop the engineering and the training in parallel, so there was a great deal of uncertainty about the process.

    By January 2008 the performers were rehearsing on a full-sized prototype of the sphere, identical in every way to the finished structure, but mounted on a static mast.Once they saw the full-size prototype, the creative team insisted that it be changed to a solid looking globe. I lost the argument, and after a number of lighting tests the open spaces between the rings were filled with elastic webbing. This allowed the rings to nest together when the sphere was packed, the performers to pass through from inside to outside, and the projectors to see a solid surface.

    The process of the creation of the show and the evolution of the style in which the sphere was done was the subject of continuous discussion for two years, meaning that we would start at 2pm and finish at 2am the following morning and do that for five days, and then I’d go back to England.

    Decision-making in Asia is always very consensual. This means they have meetings with very large numbers of people which never seem to end. Decisions don’t get made until everybody agrees and that’s a very subtle process because there is a profound hierarchy in any meeting.

    There will be an Emperor, which was always Yimou. Then there are the various courtiers arrayed below offering opinions, and all of which have to be squared away before a decision will be regarded as having been made. Westerners have a hard time understanding this because people will be nodding and saying ‘yes’ but they don’t actually mean ‘yes’, they may mean ‘Yes, that’s interesting’ or ‘Yes, what a jolly chap you are’, but they don’t mean ‘Yes, we’re going to do it’.

    There was also a lot of politics, where team members who disagreed with something would come up with a catalogue of endless excuses as to why not to do it. Nobody would say ‘This is a crap idea and we’re not going to do it’. They’d never say ‘no’, but instead they would be obstructive in a very polite way. So it was a test of patience. I’ve got endless stories about how difficult it was but in the end they’re not relevant because the show was a triumphant success. I was privileged to be asked and very lucky to be there.

AND IN THE END...
The Closing Ceremony was produced and directed by Zhang Yimou, with Chen Weiya acting as executive director. Although Yimou was the nominated director of the Closing Ceremony, Weiya had a lot of autonomy. I had worked with him on the BeiAu proposal for the Beijing Olympic Ceremonies competition entry in 2005, and he invited me to join his team at the end of 2006.

    The Closing Ceremony is always the poor relation of the Opening because the time for technical installation is very short and the opportunity for dress rehearsals in the stadium non-existent. The creative ambition of the show must therefore be limited when compared to the Opening Ceremony.

    Weiya and his team were convinced (as I was) that the Closing Ceremony needed a tall feature at some point in the show to add a third dimension to an otherwise flat event. Weiya’s first proposal featured a 30m tall tower of ladders in the centre of the stadium which Yimou did not like and for the next nine months the idea for a tower was repeatedly redesigned, rejected and redesigned again in various forms. The idea was finally accepted when I sketched a tower of human bodies in the summer of 2007.

    The final tower proposal became known as the Tower of Memory, which would be capable of lifting the 398 performers who eventually worked on to it. Somewhere in the middle of the indecision on the tower, my proposal for wide ribbon deployment from the top of the tower to the stadium rigging was also included in the proposal. The Closing Ceremony was divided into three sections entitled ‘Reunion’ (which included the Handover Ceremony), ‘The Tower of Memory’ and ‘Carnival’.

    BSEDI designed the rigging installation for the flying effects in the stadium. As is usual in these projects, the evolution of the rigging involved some obstructive posturing by the stadium management,

    In the summer of 2006, when an aerial rigging system was first proposed, they imposed completely irrational constraints on the design. Insisting that the whole roof (a structure weighing 45,000 tons) would collapse if more than 12 tons of rigging load was applied to it, they also insisted that the rigging could only be attached to the low steel of the roof trusses. This meant that in the centre of the stadium the rigging cables would be less than 30m above the field.

    This bizarre state of affairs was faithfully reproduced in a rigging installation built at the rehearsal site in Daxing, 50km south of Beijing. It was only after senior party members saw the resulting ground-scraping demonstration of the LED Olympic rings in the late spring of 2008 that permission was given to rig off the high steel, placing the rigging at a more useful 45m above the field.

    The final rigging arrangement consisted of seven cables, 192m long spanning north/south, and three ropes arranged radially spanning east/west between 160m and 170m. Thirty-one ‘flying fox’ rigs ran on the 17 cables, with payloads between 100 and 300kg. All winches ran at up to 3m per second. One humdred winches around the rim of the stadium provided vertical ‘jumping’ positions, and nine winches mounted on tracks around the rim provided rigging for acrobatic ‘runners’ around the rim.

    The multimedia equipment for the show was defined in the spring of 2008. After a long debate on the relative merits of Barco and Christie projectors, the video department decided to go with Christie digital light projectors (DLPs). Sixty-three projectors in 21 groups of three were arranged to project on to the rim of the stadium roof — a total image area 12m high x 500m long.

    Eight projectors were arranged in four pairs to project on to the sphere. Eighty projectors fitted with High End mirror heads were arranged for projection on to the field — these were overlapped in various combinations depending on image location.

    The 147m long x 22m wide LED screen in the centre of the field was supplied by GLux of Shenzhen. An additional 44,000 RGB LED pixels, each 50mm square, were mounted in the show floor, set out in a 600mm grid on each side of the main LED screen.

ON REFLECTION
Looking back on the whole process I can say that it did reinforce something I have always understood: that having and maintaining powerful ideas is the key to a successful show.

    From the outset, Yimou had the clear vision that paper, calligraphy and ink painting could form a metaphor for the story of China. His vision went through a million iterations and a tortuous path to get to the end. But the confidence of his vision confirmed my own experience of how good shows come together. The rest was just patience and tenacity.

TPi

Photography © Getty Images
and various sources