In a bid to cure our post-Oylmpic blues, we've been re-watching Union VFX's fantastic opening sequence, comprising a mix of real photography, animation and CG elements, which helped to kick off the celebrations at the opening ceremony for the Games. 

The sequence was aptly named ‘River Zoom’ as it displays a high-speed trace of the river Thames towards the Olympic stadium. We are very proud to say that one of our past Compositing Professional students, Toya Drechsler, was among those at Union who worked on the sequence. Toya has said that “watching my work on a huge screen at the opening ceremony was a fantastic and exhilarating experience”.

The majority of the film was shot using the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV which was set to stills mode shooting three frames a second. This is a technique Union had been developing for Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. It is effectively like a stop-frame animation that gets seamed together. They then cut the elements together in Avid and stabilise them in NUKE and re-project them where necessary onto geometry.