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Olympic Opening Ceremony Fireworks Were (Partly) Faked
A complete newb writes "London's Telegraph newspaper reports that some of the fireworks which appeared over Beijing during the television broadcast of the Olympic Opening Ceremony were actually computer generated. But — hold on — it's not necessarily as bad as you think. The faked fireworks were actually set-off at the stadium, but because of potential dangers in filming the display live from a helicopter, viewers at home were shown a pre-recorded, computer-generated shot." To me, the reasoning behind the faked display is no consolation or excuse — it seems hard to swallow that NBC was unaware of this televised deception. I'm glad that it was good-naturedly "revealed" this weekend (according to that Telegraph article), but it's disheartening that such a large crowd can watch (in person, and around the world) such a display and have no reason to realize they've been duped. What about when weightier events are at issue? There's also a slightly more detailed story at sky.com.
We seem to be getting too close, too fast to faked Moon landing scenarios.
Maybe it's not too late to put a stop to these practices in order to keep the authenticity of news (as reporting real events) intact.
Once we mess up reporting news items with fake elements, we are on a very slippery slope.
News, investigative journalism and eventually analysis of any type of event will become impossible, which would result in an irreversible, complete erosion of democracy.
There is no such beautiful firework or network rating figure which can compensate for this.
The only way to stop it to make such practices illegal and to sanction it with very harsh punishment.
China's gov't is learning some valuable lessons about the world, namely that fooling your own population does not scale to the freer outside world.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it is good for some outrage here. A standard disclaimer of "this televised broadcast contains elements that are computer generated etc etc" would have been appropriate.
Earlier this year when I was watching SF's Chinese New Year parade on TV, the broadcaster was clearly putting in advertisements that were intended to look like digital signage on the street and on buildings. No disclaimer was provided in that case either.
IMHO, if a broadcaster digitally manipulates or alters the recorded image in any way that makes it different from the image as recorded, a disclaimer should be made.
This would help prevent "running man" situations where the broadcasters clearly manipulate the viewer with fictitious events.
NBC censored the crap out of the opening ceremonies. They rearranged it a bit, blocked millions from watching, delayed it by hours and you expect them to honestly portray what happened? HA Ha ha ha ha ha
Thanks for the Beijing, Australian, German and other web sites that had the decency to be honest and allow the world to see the ceremonies in real time and as they happened.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Now that everyone has become aware of the ability of broadcasters to insert fake content into a supposedly live event, we should turn our attention to an event several years ago that was also faked: 'hijacked aircraft flying into the World Trade Center'. There's a convenient video course about what was done and how, called "September Clues" You can find the first installment here:
http://www.livevideo.com/video/embedLink/6F393F4DE41C4CF798CBB438E6378129/228144/september-clues-part1.aspx
P. Orin Zack
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I write pointed political short stories at my blog, http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
First at Google on a search for political short stories.
China is a country that had made an art form out of misinformation and manipulation. Couple that with the near-mafia that is the IOC, and this shouldn't be surprising in the least.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Nope. The BBC broadcast did *not* say that.
They in fact explitictly say *fireworks* not CGI sequence. Watch it on the iplayer again. Seems like a case of clear deception to me.
Of course Slashdot has to - the connotations of the Memory Hole and a sniff of eeeevvviiiiillll Corporate Masters is exactly what Slashdot favors. Facts be dammed.