They pulled it off. They tricked 4 billion people. And people are still being fooled as the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony is still one of the highest downloads on BitTorrent.
What amazes me is not lip syncing the national anthem or forging the ages of athletes or even faking the weather with silver-iodide. It is electronically inserting giant computer generated footprints onto our television sets and passing them off as fireworks.
It is probably best to ignore ethics when discussing the opening ceremony. China had something to prove and its technicians should be applauded. It lasted only 55 seconds but took almost a year to create.
Meticulous efforts were made to conjure 29 footprints in the night sky, from seeking advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate the hazy effects of Beijing's smog at night to inserting a slight camera shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter to then perfectly inserting it into 4 billion living rooms as beautiful footprint fireworks.
Britain the bar may just be too high...
