London Olympic Opening Ceremony

59 were invited by artistic director Danny Boyle to join his creative team as video designers for the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Led by project Creative Director Leo Warner, the 59 team provided design, animation and film production services, as well as programming and technical design services for ‘the greatest show on Earth’. The team’s primary role was to design and create all the video content delivered the Olympic Stadium. This included the four massive LED screens mounted on the stadium roof, all projection in the show, and the “audience pixels” – a vast, stadium-wide video surface comprising a custom-built 9-pixel LED panel mounted between every one of the 70,000 seats*.

Much of the content produced for the ceremony by 59 was also delivered direct to broadcast, including the 60-second countdown to the start of the ceremony, a series of title cards, and a number of graphic and typographic elements and overlays.

A huge undertaking with an audience to match, 59 delivered one of the most technically sophisticated opening ceremonies the world has ever seen, a powerful journey through this history of the United Kingdom writ large on the canvas of the Olympic Stadium.