Back to the Olympic theme as the fortnight of the London 2012 Games winds down. Here’s the teaser commercial the BBC was running before the Games began; I was lucky when the Beeb’s embed code wouldn’t work in WordPress, because it forced me to search it up on YouTube, and find a full-length version.
The great thing about this, besides the sheer spectacular beauty of the entire concept, is that it’s all done in the box as a machinima. There isn’t a live frame in it anywhere! It wasn’t filmed in Second Life; I’d love it even more if it had been. The idea, of course, is that the whole of London, and even England, is the backdrop for the Games. You have fishing trawlers laying down lane floats for swimming; boxers in a ring at a cargo port; runners racing down an East End street (with the finish line in front of a shop with the sign Photo Finish); a gymnast doing floor exercises on a pedestrian bridge in the City; an athlete using the south-shore beaches as her sand pit for the long jump…. And all around in the background, you see the upper edges of the Olympic Stadium, showing that the whole country is watching. Take a look at this thing — you’ll get the idea.
The BBC liked this so much that they use still and partially animated concept frames at the bottom of each of their Olympic Web pages. If you want to see them (a few of them pop up only rarely), run off to their site and go to the bottom of each page.
