The opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics stunned the world. Behind the visible excitement, in fact, there are countless little-known details including visual effects creativity and printing binding.
In Beijing, there is a university that helps the Winter Olympics in a rare way for teachers, students and alumni to "full chain and join forces", leaving a vivid practice of "academic + practical work" at one obscure point after another.
Beijing Institute of Printing, as a creative base authorized by the Opening and Closing Ceremony Work Department of the Organizing Committee of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, has set up an opening ceremony visual effects team composed of visual effects creative design team, digital ink animation group and pattern design and production team, led by Wang Zhiou, visual effects director of the opening ceremony and alumnus of the school, under the guidance of the director team, completed the visual effects creative design of the opening ceremony "Ice and Snow Five Rings" rising, "Li Chun", "Tribute to the People", pre-ceremony performance "Together to the Future", and athlete admission , the production of coordinated tasks, to achieve digital empowerment of aesthetic innovation expression.
Giving full play to the traditional advantages of "inheriting and promoting printing civilization and innovating the development of publishing culture", Beijing Institute of Printing also undertook to complete the design and binding of the opening ceremony manual, the design and construction of the image landscape of the five major venues of the Winter Olympic Games, the design of the city volunteer logo system and other visual presentation projects, using Chinese creative design to carry forward the Olympic spirit and tell the story of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Ink animation presents a Chinese style
In the "Ice and Snow Five Rings" session of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, a group of ink animations full of "Chinese style" showed the development of the Winter Olympic Movement, and helped the ice sculptures of ice and snow rings to slowly rise in the bird's nest.
According to Gao Yanmei, the head of the ink animation team and a professor at the Beijing Institute of Printing, after testing nearly a thousand paper effects and drawing nearly 30,000 frames of digital animation, the humanoid design effect of the seventh edition of the Chinese style was finally finalized.
At the end of last year, 84 days before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the digital ink animation innovation design team of the Beijing Institute of Printing and Printing received an important task: to design the ink animation effect for the "ice and snow five rings" of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games.
How to make the scientific and technological design of the original moving humanoid complement the Chinese ink painting style has become a difficult problem for the team to overcome.
It is still necessary to find the answer from the wisdom of China's excellent traditional culture.
The team tried to combine the two forms of artistic creation of brush rice paper hand-drawn and digital ink brushes, first hand-painted the humanoid figures of the previous Winter Olympic sports, and recorded them completely through digital shooting, and artistically rendered them into animation effects.
The whole process uses the method of "visual image to take meaning", grasps the trajectory of the humanoid movement, highlights the life rhythm and sportsmanship of the characters, and strengthens the tactile transformation from paper to digital by strengthening the pen, stroke, pen, dry pen, dun pen, etc. of calligraphy and cursive writing, and reflects the Chinese-style ink animation art in the scientific and technological sense of the animated humanoid.
Digital art interprets cultural self-confidence
At the opening ceremony, 30 minutes before the countdown began, the "Together to the Future" digital exhibition session, the traditional Chinese auspicious pattern that has been rolling on the huge ground screen with the effect of ground ice sculpture, derived from dozens of sets of traditional Chinese patterns created by the visual effects team pattern group, came into view through high-tech means and new creative methods. The giant three-dimensional ice sculpture and the ice cube before the appearance of the Olympic rings form a visual echo, constituting a dialogue between ancient and modern. The combination of high-tech means and romantic artistic expression also blends the tradition and future of Chinese culture.
The design idea of the athletes' entrance ceremony is to open the "auspicious door" and dedicate the most sincere blessings to the world; open the "window of the world" to show China's magnificent rivers and mountains.
Through months-long research, the teachers and students of the Visual Effects Creative Design Team at the opening ceremony determined the design scheme of window frames and door frames based on traditional Chinese patterns.
In order to better reflect the excellent cultural genes such as self-confidence, cultural heritage, and good wishes of a big country, Liu Yi and Yang Jie, young teachers of visual effects coordination, led the team members to redesign through a large number of data collection, hundreds of sketches, and multiple rounds of review by design experts, and finally determined more than 30 sets of detailed plans, drawing on the traditional patterns of China's southeast, southwest, and northwest, with the design elements of auspicious clouds, echoes, square victories, ruyi patterns, ice cracks, plum patterns, baoxiang patterns, curly grass patterns, etc., by scattering and reconstructing, integrating ice and snow elements. It has created a new context of Chinese graphic design that is both traditional and uniquely modern.
In the opening ceremony "Lichun" session and "Tribute to the People" link, the main creative team enhanced the realistic effect of visual effects images and actor performance interaction, and finally presented a beautiful picture of "heaven, earth, and people" symbiosis and co-prosperity and the most beautiful picture of tribute to the people of the world.
"Butterfly Suit" takes the details of the frame
The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony Manual is an important medium to present the content and process of the opening ceremony to the audience and international guests, and is also the core carrier that perfectly presents the Olympic etiquette and Chinese style. The handbook was designed by the team of Professor Xia Xiaoqi of Beijing Institute of Printing and printed by the alumni culture group of the school.
The team highlighted the creative theme of "Warm Winter Sun" in the overall design concept of the manual, and integrated warm sunlight into the color tone of ice and snow blue, aiming to let ice and snow athletes from all over the world feel a kind of warmth in the competition and see the hope of overcoming difficulties together, overcoming the epidemic, and the good wishes of "going to the future together".
In terms of overall design style, the simple and bright modern design style is integrated with the "simple style" of traditional Chinese art, creating an ethereal artistic conception and the beauty of virtual reality, which not only tells the past and future urban style of Beijing's "City of The Double Olympics", but also highlights the meteorological atmosphere of China's innovative culture in the new era.
In order not to destroy the integrity of the picture and not to leave a binding line in the center of the folio page, the program book adopts the classic technique of binding ancient Chinese books - butterfly clothing.
The tri-fold program list adopts high-tech and high-level printing technology and process standards, which not only retains the flexibility of the pages of Chinese books, but also the paper must be hard enough to meet the cold climate conditions and the comfort of the audience wearing gloves to read, and the amount of brush glue used when the pages are framed and the spacing between the glue dots is determined after repeated tests. In order to ensure quality, the production process of each book involves a lot of manual work.
(Guangming Daily all-media reporter Dong Cheng correspondent Zou Yunjie)
Source: Guangming Daily all-media reporter Dong Cheng correspondent Zou Yunjie
Photo: Beijing Institute of Printing, Beijing News client
Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yongqun
Editor: Wu Yaqi Xing Yanyan