[BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] Hello. In this video we will present how the Olympic ceremonies are produced and adaptated for television. In addition, we will explain an original approach to the analysis of the Olympic ceremonies linked with the cultural tradition. An intellectual perspective that tries to interpret the so-called mega-events from a critical perspective. The Opening Ceremony is the event of the Olympic Games that is more followed by the global audiences on television. At the same time, due to its intrinsic complexity, diversity and plastical richness, it is the most difficult to produce on television for the Olympic Broadcasting Services. Every Opening and Closing ceremony of the Games has a director, who is the maximum creative responsible. He creates the concepts and designs the elements and stories of the Opening and Closing ceremonies on ocassions as if they were a stage play. In fact, for the spectators in the stadium and only for them the ceremonies are a sort of stage play. For the rest of the audience, the billions of television spectators around the world, the ceremonies are a television programme. Therefore, a collaboration between the director of the Opening and Closing ceremonies, and the producers and directors of the Olympic Broadcasting Services is absolutely crucial in order to transform the stage play into a television programme. In a television programme, the producers and television directors need to divide the space as an audiovisual space that will be covered by the different cameras located in different places of the stadium: the stands, on the playing field, plus others in order to take shots of the parts of the opening ceremonies. 40 different cameras are located inside the stadium in order to offer the billions of viewers around the world the major variety of possible perspective, shoots and angles of the Opening and Closing ceremonies of the Olympics. So, the director of the production and his collaborators have to select from a great number of cameras to enrich the viewing experience of the audience. For instance, from the 40 cameras, two of them are really flying over the stadium on two helicopters and four or five cameras are the so-called steadicams, which constantly move on the play field, changing and updating the shots. Another one is suspended on cables over the top of the stadium too, in order to take images from the top, to offer shots a bird's eye view. Two cameras are located on the opposite grandstand to the one where the heads of the state and authorities are sat, in order to take a shot at them during the athletes' parades. This is the moment in which apart from the national team on the field, the head of state or a representative of the country is offered to the spectators in a medium shot. Here you can see the camera planning of the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Paralympic Games, which used a fewer number of cameras than the Opening ceremony of the Games, but can help you to understand the complexity of a camera planning of the Olympic Games. They are celebrated in the same stadium and with a very similar structure. Due to the complexity of the television production of the Opening and Closing ceremonies, some rehearsals need to be carried out. One year before the Olympics, the opening ceremony of the Games is practiced dividing the ceremony into different parts. Four days before the Games there is another practice without the presence of spectators. Two days before there is a general rehearsal with spectators, trying to reproduce the same conditions of the real Opening and Closing ceremonies. Leaving aside the rituals or symbols of the Olympic Movement that are repeated in every Olympic ceremony, but whose meaning is presented by the commentators of every international television, in every Opening and Closing ceremony there are a number of elements that need to be decored for the spectators. Without the commentators' explanation, a audience would not understand those elements correctly. In other words, as an audiovisual spectacle, the creators of the Olympic ceremonies design them thinking of a meaning, but the international media interpretation is different from culture to culture. The ceremonies need to be well explained to the audience so that interpretation is consistent with the creators' intention. That is the reason why the Organizing Committee of the Games offer to the different broadcasters an explanation of the cultural keys of the ceremonies, so that they can transmit them to the audiences of their respective countries. These explanations are contained in specific media guides, and if you would like to know more about them, you can explore these document published for the London 2012 Opening and Closing Ceremonies. You can find the links at the end of this presentation. Confronted to the theory of the storytelling that I have previously presented, it exists another way of interpreting the stories, more critical, which is the so-called narrative. The narrative links the interpretation not to the simplicity but to our cultural past, from the classic literature to the old narrations of the classic period. The narrative is an intellectual approach to the ways of telling stories and their nature. According to Dayan and Katz, reality is uprooted by media events. If an event originates in a particular location, that location is turned into a Hollywood set. According to these authors, the television events, therefore, may not only one in which the reproduction is as important as the original, as Benjamin proposed, but also one in which the reproduction is more important than the original. Following that trend, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz claim that all mega-events can be classified into at least one of these three categories. Contest. Conquest. And coronation. That Olympic competition is conceived clearly like a contest. The winners are honoured during the medal ceremonies or Closing ceremonies. Therefore, the Olympics are a coronation too. The Olympic Games and the sport championships on television are, due to their richness and complexity, the only mega-event that can be classified into two categories at the same time.
