26 August 2014
In the evening of 16 August 2014, the opening ceremony of the 2nd Summer Youth Olympic Games was held in Nanjing. Chinese President Xi Jinping, UK Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IOC Chairman Thomas Bach, as well as the heads of state of a number of countries, officiated the opening ceremony.
The flag of Olympics flew once again over the territory of China after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Same as the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA) was actively involved in the widely and highly appraised opening ceremony of the Nanjing Youth Olympic Games.
The Shanghai Multimedia Entertainment Virtual Synthesis Studio, a joint initiative of STA and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission, was responsible for the creative planning, design and production of part of the visual contents of the opening ceremony. Because of that, the project team of the virtual studio had traveled frequently between Shanghai/Beijing and Shanghai/Nanjing since March this year. The key creative and technical members of the team even had even stayed in Nanjing for almost a month since late June.
On 4 August, STA President Han Sheng came to Nanjing and visited the STA staff working at the site of the opening ceremony of Youth Olympic Games. As an expert in stage design, he provided advice on the visual creation and exchanged views with Chen Weiya, Chief Director of the opening ceremony of the Youth Olympic Games and Sha Xiaolan, Chief Designer for Lighting and Visual Effects of the opening ceremony. Sha Xiaolan, a STA alumnus, who was one of the key members of the “STA regiment” during the Beijing Olympic Games, was again among the key creative staff.
