Wednesday, August 13, 2008

You Are Inside the Matrix

We’ve been hearing for months about how China’s most famous fireworks expert had spent weeks rigging the city for the most spectacular fireworks display ever seen.  Fireworks were invented here, and the display was promised to be something spectacular.  Unfortunately, they turned out to be about as real as most of China’s Chanel purses.

As incredible as the Olympics opening ceremony fireworks looked on our television screens, it’s disheartening to learn that some of what we saw was a computer-generated illusion.

The Telegraph picked up a story in the Chinese newspaper the Beijing Times which explained that filming the 29 firework “footprints” from the air would have been impossible. So visual effects artists spent a year creating a computer-graphic simulation—inserted precisely at the same time the real fireworks went off—to bedazzle home viewers as if they were at the actual ceremony. The fireworks themselves were real enough, but if you were watching on TV, what you saw was a CG simulation of that reality, happening in real-time. Confused yet?

According to the report, the only real fireworks TV viewers got to see were those filmed from inside the Bird’s Nest.

Note that when you click on the link for “picked up” it goes to the UK paper The Telegraph.  That page isn’t making it through the Great Firewall of China.  I can get to the regular Telegraph page, just not that article.

What a pisser.  They blocked off the 4th Ring Road, one of the major freeways circling the city, ostensibly so they could set up these fireworks in safety.  The traffic on the 3rd Ring Road, the one I take home every night, was unimaginable.  Now we find it was all bullshit.

Smoke and mirrors.  As I’ve said before, China cares less about the reality and more about the illusion.  They care less about being a modern, thriving city than they do about looking like a modern, thriving city. 

Update: From Boing Boing.

Keep all this digital trickery in mind when televised footage shows superhuman Chinese atheletes sweeping gold after gold. Or when a giant crimson dragon swoops out of the heavens like Falcor during the closing ceremony to kiss the head of Hu Jintao and then passionately denounce the independence of Tibet and Taiwan.

No, that will be real.  Trust me.