Laser-carved ice and snow five rings, by the actors to jointly build a snowflake, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics at the beautiful moment impressed many audiences. Among them, the creativity and production of the two links of "Ice and Snow Five Rings" and "Building a Snowflake" were completed by a team of young designers from the Nuclear Octopus Studio in Nanxiang, Jiading, Shanghai.
"Build a Snowflake" program at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics This article is provided by the interviewees
"Time is tight, the task is heavy, and the pressure is high." Team leader Huang Chen admitted that this is the most challenging large-scale activity project he has encountered in the past 19 years of his career, "the production and testing time left for the team is only more than 4 months." ”
In "Five Rings of Ice and Snow", 24 lasers shoot at the ice cube, carving history on the huge ice cube, from the previous Winter Olympics to the Beijing Winter Olympics, the light and shadow change as if time and space travel, and there is a "Chinese style" color ink animation... These effects are inseparable from the unique digital calligraphy hand-drawn animation.
"Using the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy to draw character animation is very rare in the industry and can be said to be the first in the world." Huang Chen told reporters that the difficulty is mainly due to the contradiction between calligraphy and animation characteristics, in calligraphy, pen transportation, pen practice, pen, dry pen, etc., each pen is a different shape, it is difficult to unify the shape, so it will cause the picture to be stuck and flickering.
In the process of creation, Huang Chen attaches the greatest importance to the content of carving.
Carving humanoid figures, encountered the problem of laser and ink figures difficult to align; engraving text, the number of words is large, the position is mainly on the front, the number of lasers in the front is not enough, and the laser in the rear "nowhere to stretch" also does not work... In the end, everyone returned to their original intention and used 24 lasers to outline the moving lines in the background in the image. In close cooperation with the beijing black bow post-production team, the "magical paper man" finally jumped on the ice, and the modern sense of science and technology was full. The 24 lasers represent the 24th Winter Olympics, coinciding with February 4th, the 24th solar terms of spring, everything is very coincidental.
Sketch of the idea of Building a Snowflake
As the only show in the audience that uses professional dancers, "Construct a Snowflake" is characterized by accurate bite rehearsals. "We need to match every frame with the stage machinery, the 96 actors' movements, the videos, the music, and constantly grind and adjust and optimize."
The climax of the whole session – how do you bring the snowflakes together into a torchbearer? In order to meet the director's requirements for solemn and aesthetic visual effects, the team added a skyline. The emergence of this line also opens up a new space for dance: the sky is accompanied by snowflakes falling, and the actors dance along the skyline to build a convergence. Snowflakes in their teleportation, circumnavigating the field, visually avoiding the mechanical scheduling in the center of the stage, and finally the big snowflakes fell from the sky, which was completely consistent with the rising torch platform, which was beautiful.