Baku 2015 1st European Games - Opening Ceremony (AZE)
Sports
Baku, Azerbaijan was very eager to host the first European games ever. The event was opened with an astounding ceremony on Saturday the 13th of July, live witnessed by 68.000 people in the stadium and broadcasted worldwide on television. As the Azerbaijan carpet is proclaimed by the UNESCO as a masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, a carpet just had to be part of the opening ceremony.
Our assignment was to create a flying carpet as if it was a real one,… thin, moving, no visible strings,…
We designed a full custom motion system, all integrated in a backbone structure of just 15cm thin! All motion technology was fitted in here. 42 swiveling “arms” connected to the central electro-mechanical system made the carpet wave while flying. The carpet had a total length of 3m80 and a width of 2m60. Just a little bit smaller than the original.
One of the most important questions was to make it look like the Azeri rug. So we duplicated the original carpet with a full color hi-res digital printed version. The fringes around the carpet’s edges made it look very much like the original!
Suspended from “invisible” matt black steel cables, coming from the stadium’s tracking system above, the carpet took off in the air from the ceremony stage. Azerbaijan Murgam singer Alim Qasimov performed while sitting on the flying carpet.
