Olympics 2012: The Opening Ceremony

I noticed this on the EBU feed - but you can see it playing on the venue screens, and it was played out on the Closing Ceremony feed.

I don't know why, but whenever I see the Isles of Wonder slab onwards, I can just imagine Terry Wogan giving a Eurovision style sarcastic welcome.

One thing I never saw an explanation for was why they missed out Los Angeles 1984 and Atlanta 1996 at that part of the sequence


I thought that 60 second countdown was great - so much work for something that probably wasn't seen by most of the ceremony's viewers

It was straight out of Eurovision in the way that it established the venue. It did seem like they made a particular effort to include things just for the TV audience, which I don't think has been the case before. Apart from things like the footprints in Beijing's have past ceremonys had VT inserts?

Incidently the worst thing about the recorded inserts was that quite a lot of the archive material hadn't had it's aspect ratio changed so everything appeared stretched on TV. However in the case of the sequences that were shown on the house in the middle of the stadium they were correct there

Yeah it's not great is it. I feel bad saying it about someone like Barry Davies but a lot of the commentary is really quite poor - mainly as you say by not shutting up. Maybe we got off lightly with Trevor Nelson.

Watching it again on BBC ONE now. I really must get on with life!

the Isle of Wonder did remind me of Eurovision 1998!

Watching this still makes me feel incredibly proud and humble.

Each time I see this sequence (start of the NHS stuff) I decide the camera work / direction is worse than I remember. Really upbeat music, people dancing, steadicam's everywhere, so what do we get, some slow pans on the steadicams and a load of venue wide shots. The cameras should have been down there on their segways running around between the dancers, basically joining in.

And I'm still yet to see a single shot off the steadicam which is flying.

It was reported before the event, that Boyle was unhappy with how some of the ceremony was going to be shot by the OBS contractors. This was in The Guardian. Overall, well shot I think given so much is going on at any one time.

There's lots in it that I didn't spot or see first time round.

Some of the cutaways and camera shots are far from perfect, especially the sometimes random cuts to VT items. But then it was a live event and will never be perfect. hopefully Danny Boyle's 'directors cut' will clean up a lot of it

I can't remember if I asked here before, but almost certainly didn't seen an answer - apparently the BBC lent an original Test Card F slide for the ceremony, though it may have only been used in the venue screens. Did anybody see it?

I see Brazil is still "the world's biggest democracy" in Huw's book in the repeat, and the rather dubious-looking 'wave' from the German fan were still there in the repeat!