Blog 4! 4 weeks to go...14 rehearsals to go!

Hey there,

Happy Friday!

Can you believe its now only 28 days until the Olympic Opening Ceremony? We have a chalk board up in our flat with a countdown on. I remember when I started the countdown and it was over 100 days to go!

Since my last blog, I've had a busy and tiring couple of rehearsals.

Last Sunday, we arrived at the Stadium for an early call of 8.30am. Having to be up that early on a Sunday should definitely be illegal. Once we had made our way through the tight airport style security, checked in, collected our lunch pack (yum!) and made our way to the Stadium stands - it was more or less 10am! It's actually making me wonder how long it is going to take about 100,000 people in total to get into the Stadium on show night!

The Sunday rehearsal was really exciting. This was the first time all of my section were in the Stadium together (as we had only been together in Dagenham) complete with full props, set and scenery. We did a full run through of our section which looked and sounded AMAZING!! Although the 1,000 in my section have only been rehearsing on the spot at the moment, it’s weird how quickly your energy goes - especially when you are doing strenuous arm exercises for 17 minutes (I'm determined to still not reveal the full secret of what we are doing)!!

We were quite lucky actually, as we had just finished our complete section when it decided to belt it down... and when I say belt it down, I mean belt it down! Well, it was lucky for us! The rest of my section had the task of resetting the props and set back to the start so that we could do another run through - this involved being out in the rain and moving lots and lots of different pieces of set back to their places - nice how i got to stay in the comfort of the dry stands though!

On Monday, you guessed it; we were back at the Stadium. We were back to the 1,000 of my group and set to work on 'blocking' where we would be entering from, the beat in which we will be walking to and what we will be doing when we get to our spots.

I was actually quite jealous as a good few of my group, got to go up the 'Tor' - If you look at the picture of the set from my earlier posts; it's the bit where the big tree is! It's actually really high up and I can imagine that the view from up there is just immense.

We managed to get through quite a few different technical aspects of the sequence which we were unfamiliar with before, so it was nice to come away feeling like we were getting closer and more prepared for show day.

I don’t know if you seen the other day, but in the London Evening Standard and The Sun newspapers, they had printed an Arial view image that someone had taken of the set being built. It's actually really sneaky that the papers would do that and would even want to ruin the surprise factor that the global audience are going to get - but hey. they were only speculating as to what they think everything is and to be honest, it was all news to me. Lesson learnt: Don’t believe everything you read in the paper!

So, two more rehearsals this weekend (Saturday and Sunday) and then this time next week, it will be only three weeks to go - Yikes! I best get off and practice my 'Marshalling Routines'!

Have a great weekend, and I’ll leave you with a few pictures below!

Until next time...

Craig



Sneaky picture captured from above the stadium.





External shot of Olympic Stadium.