TSDOAL2012OV – Opening Ceremony Dress Rehearsal

Opening Ceremony Dress Rehearsal

I will be honest, it is pretty spectacular. There are lights, flashing lights in fact, and a whole load of twelve thousand person choreographed dancing.
That is all I will be sharing, however. You might be thinking, “BUT THIS IS MEANT TO BE A SECRET DIARY, SPILL THE BEANS MATE” but they were very big on us keeping it a secret, so much so that blazed across all of the big screens for the duration of the ceremony was the slogan #savethesurprise – yes, they even have their own don’t-spoil-the-opening-ceremony hashtag. New media marketing 1, closed rehearsals 0! Not only this, but impressively enough, DANNY BOYLE HIMSELF came out on stage to ask each of the 40 thousand people in the stadium to #savethesurprise. New media marketing 1, shy artistic geniuses 0!
And so because of this, I will be #savethesurprise (which doesn’t work grammatically at all. This hashtag is so limited. New media marketing 0, grammar police 1 and there goes their 100% win record).

My only criticism would be that it has more going on than Bret, and the TV cameras may not be able to adequately capture just how much is simultaneously happening. In Beijing they also had twelve thousand performers but they were all doing the same thing at the same time (I just googled it) so it worked for TV. My only suggestion would be to set up around 50 red button options so you can see everything that is happening on 50 tiny split screens. This type of suggestion is why I haven’t been employed as any kind of creative position for anything ever.

In other news, all the tubes were messed up on the way there and the way home which bodes ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLY for the coming weeks. Apparently they blamed the hot weather for expanding tracks buckling. I learned in year 8 physics that metal expands in the heat so to angrily claim that TFL engineers have the mental age of a 12 year old (like we all have at some point in our tube ordeal-ridden lives) suddenly isn’t hyperbole. It took me 2 hours to get home, but at least it was in the name of sharing all this fairly limited info with all you guys out there wondering what a vague, sarcastic account of the opening ceremony rehearsal would look like. You can thank me later, London.