Looking through Trish's twitter she said on 27 July during the Opening Ceremony that she was ruled out of the doing the olympic ceremonies because her French wasn't strong enough. Suggests her work at the Closing Ceremony was a last minute thing then.
Just looked at Layla's Twitter, and she posted on the 27th July that she was only doing the Opening Ceremony. It's possible that Trish was asked last minute, or she maybe just wanted to keep her role under wraps?
Looking through Trish's twitter she said on 27 July during the Opening Ceremony that she was ruled out of the doing the olympic ceremonies because her French wasn't strong enough. Suggests her work at the Closing Ceremony was a last minute thing then.
Just looked at Layla's Twitter, and she posted on the 27th July that she was only doing the Opening Ceremony. It's possible that Trish was asked last minute, or she maybe just wanted to keep her role under wraps?
Your probably right. The Closing Ceremony programme will give it away as they were probably printed weeks in advance. I can't see any last minute changes, and to be fair there was a lot less announcing required in the Closing Ceremony so they could get away with Trish not needing to do any French.
The music that accompanied the 60 second 'world' countdown is released today on iTunes. It's called 'The Road Goes on Forever' (One MInute to Midnight Extended mix) and samples The Who's Baba O'Reily. It's by High Contrast.
I wonder if it might be used again for the Paralympic ceremonies considering they had no worries about using it for both Olympic ceremonies and although each ceremony has different directors ultimately I believe they're all one big team.
Now the paralympics are about to start, I wonder IF the presenters will be picked up as many incorrectly pronounce the word athlete or athletics and put a nonexistant vowel in to make ath
e
lete or ath
a
letics. It is something that I find quite irritating.
Sorry to dredge this thread up again, but I watched the ceremony today with Directors' Commentary and it raised a couple of interesting points.
First, Danny Boyle admitted that he didn't use OBS for the 'show' parts of the ceremony - instead he used Done and Dusted Productions and his own director. He expressed his dissatisfaction with OBS for the parts that they covered, including the National Anthem, the lighting of the cauldron and the raising of the flag.
Also, he claimed that the Paul McCartney problem was the 'reinforcement' track being broadcast by 'mistake' - not sure that's quite true, as he clearly missed the count-in on the click-track if you watch closely for the drummer's reaction.
When I have a chance, I'll watch the DVD cut side-by-side with the live version, but it looks to be far better put together on numerous occasions and a few details tidied up - such as the colour altered on the pre-recorded James Bond helicopter shots to match the darkness of the live shots. There were several occasions on the commentary where Boyle bemoaned that pieces of footage simply weren't available - usually blaming OBS for this!
Yeah, there are a couple of bits that were missed from the broadcast of the industrial revolution sequence. On TV Kenneth Branagh was was seen getting on a platform surrounded by cameras, but in the directors cut you get to see the flashbulbs go off and the pictures taken. The suffragettes had a great moment with a dance referencing the woman who threw herself under a horse at the Derby which was mostly missed on TV, and there was a shot from what appeared to be underneath the stadium with more factory workers toiling away which was entirely missed.
There are also many better shot choices throughout - you can actually read all of Tim Berners Lee's "This is for everyone" message on the stadium pixels this time and the parachuting "Queen" is followed for longer, I recall on the broadcast there was a long shot of the stadium for ages with not much happening.
I was at the ceremony and there is one thing that didn't turn up either in the broadcast or the director's cut. At the start we were told that in the sequence with 80s and 90s music, there would be big clear beach balls with smiley faces on thrown into the lower tiers to bounce around and some of them would have cameras inside, so everyone should try to look where the nose would be and smile, because they'd be on TV. No idea what happened with that. There were also giant versions with dancers inside that were put on the standing "mosh pit" areas, I think they show up in the director's cut but weren't on TV.
Yes I noticed a few nice edits on it too. The James Bond parachute section has some much better shots of the stunt men coming down into the stadium - on the live version there were a lot of wide shots with not a lot going on.
Also the TARDIS clip got put back in so now there isn't just the sound of it (although it's a clip from the 1996 movie in the 70s section - not that it particularly matters but it seems such an odd choice when there must be plenty from the modern series they could use). Looking at one of the extras which shows what was going on during the "Thanks Tim" section it's no wonder stuff got missed, such a huge scale of ambition for a live show.