Media art graces Olympic opening
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A media art performance studs the Olympic Stadium in PyeongChang, Friday, during the opening ceremony for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics held in Gangwon Province. / Yonhap
By Yun Suh-young
“Wow” was the only word that could describe the opening ceremony of the PyeongChang Olympics held Friday evening at the Olympic Stadium in Daegwallyeong, PyeongChang, Gangwon Province.
From beginning to end, the opening ceremony drew exclamations from audiences watching from both the stadium and on TV. Yet deeper admiration and awe came from those staring at their live UHD TV screens at home, simply because the media and visual art could be felt as an entirety on screen; whereas on site, it would have been difficult for the audience to put the puzzle pieces together.
Given a limited budget to spend for the opening ceremony, the executive creative director for this two-and-a-half-hour long show, Song Seung-hwan, did a magnificent job maximizing what little that he had to the fullest.
He cleverly used visual arts to fill the stadium, and some was even prerecorded, instead of having everything being performed on site and in person.
“After seeing the Rio Olympics myself, and knowing they also had a limited budget but were praised for high quality, I knew I could do the same. When I was sitting there, I didn’t quite understand why certain things were done the way they were, but when I saw the recorded video after the Olympics ended, I fully understood why things were done that way. What didn’t make sense on site was actually for the aerial view shot from above,” he said in an interview with a local magazine, prior to the Olympics last year.
Comments for PyeongChang Olympics’ opening ceremony from both in and outside of Korea were positive, filled with compliments. Broadcasters such as CNN and BBC said it was “truly enjoyable” and was a “spectacle” not to mention certain props from the show going viral online such as the “Inmyeonjo,” a human-faced bird prop which became a trending search word. Song himself was a buzzword for days on a local portal website, while “drone” and “opening ceremony” were also most-searched words online.
Song is a well-known performance producer and actor best known for his production of “Nanta,” a non-verbal percussion and dance performance which drew wide global audience overseas since its inception in 1997.
With only 600 billion won to spend for the ceremony, one tenth of the budget used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics which cost 6 trillion won ($550 million), Song managed to whip up a performance that was both breathtaking and touching, encompassing Korea’s past, present and future in beautiful media art mixed with live performance. It was a well-presented delicious dish balancing speed, technology, aesthetics and content.
Intel's drone team rehearses with their Shooting Star drones as they light up the sky to create the Olympic logo for the opening ceremony held Friday. The scene was pre-recorded and played simultaneously as skiers and snowboarders performed down the slope. / Intel-Yonhap
Most notable was the usage of lighting, VR and drones — the latter which drew gasps from those watching as 1,218 drones danced in harmony to create the Olympic logo while skiers and snowboarders slalomed down the slope. The drones were Intel’s Shooting Star which broke the Guinness World Records in that performance for the largest number of autonomous drones used for collective flight. The spectacular scene shown during the Olympics opening ceremony was pre-shot in December last year to avoid any unexpected weather hazards.
Not only that, the audience watching the ceremony felt like they were time-traveling in space with the glitzy VR technology used for the performance. Multiple media arts technologies guided the audience through Korea’s past to today’s tech-advanced present while five children acted out the relevant scenes.
It took two and a half years to prepare the two-hour performance since Song was appointed to lead the creative team for the Olympics opening ceremony in July, 2015.
“I’m truly thankful to everyone who watched the ceremony. It took a lot of hard work from all participants. I was worried about the weather but thanks to God we were able to successfully finish,” he said, during a press conference held Saturday morning, a day after the opening ceremony, at the Alpensia Resort’s main media center.
Regarding the much talked-about torch relay featuring figure skater Yuna Kim dancing atop the massive column holding the torch, Song said it was an “homage” to the 1988 Seoul Olympics which left a mark in people’s memories with the hoop-carrying boy that became famous.
“The torch lighting this time was indirect. It was to have figure skater Yuna Kim to light the bottom of the column and a fire column featuring 30 fire-lit hoops would shoot up to the top to light up the torch. It’s meant to refer to the 30 years since the last Olympics was held in Korea,” said Song.
Ironically, what was a bit disappointing was the actual performance by humans. Four famous Korean singers — Jeon In-kwon, Ha Hyun-woo, Lee Eun-mee and Bolbbalgan4 — sang “Imagine” as a quartet during a candle-lit performance, but due to cold and other factors, their vocal strengths were hardly shown. Meanwhile, a lesser known singer, soprano Hwang Su-mi, actually did a better job at capturing audience attention singing the Olympic Hymn with strong and confident voice.