London 2012 Olympic Ceremonies

2012 was the year of the London Olympics and a 7 month project. During this time I was fortunate enough to be part of an amazing team at Crystal CG working on the Audience Pixels for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Ceremonies. My position there was as their Pre Visualizer and Senior Animator. During the 7 months I worked on the project I was responsible for setting up all the pixel maps to enable the animators to produce the work for the audience pixels. This involved many challenges including creating After Effects templates that helped correct the distortions that the bowl like shape of the stadium naturally made. Another challenge was to create a process so we could work as if the image was being projected down onto the stadium, instead of working as if we were standing in the stadium, this was seen in the Opening ceremony with the Union Flag slowly rippling during the Queen and James Bonds parachute jump. These were just a few of the technical aspects that had to be figured out to make best use of the Audience Pixels.

As well as this I was working on sequences across all four ceremonies ranging from parts of the protocol segments for both opening ceremonies, 2D and 3D elements that were used in all Ceremonies including the finale of the Olympic Closing Ceremony.

One moment that I feel worked particularly well was the Underground section in the Olympic Opening Ceremony where I created a loop of an underground tunnel from the viewpoint of a tube train driver. I rendered out the elements using a 360-degree camera so the final composited piece gave the impression the whole stadium was travelling down the tunnel.

These past few months have been amazing and being able to work on such a large canvas was incredible. My thanks to all at Crystal CG and the OOC, OCC, POC and PCC teams for the last 7 months, it was a blast and hope to work with you all soon.