November 11, 2005 evening. New China's oldest sports building, Beijing Workers' Stadium, was decked out in festive attire. As night fell, Beijing entered the 1,000-day countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games. The mascot of the 29th Olympic Games was finally unveiled during the commemorative activities held for this important moment.
At 20:15, Party and state leader Jia Qinglin touched the switch on the release device with his hand, and five beams of laser light shot out from the release device were thrown at the big screen, on which the mascot outlines were sketched out, and the five lively and lovely mascot images were fixed on the big screen. At the same time, five 2-meter-high inflatable mascot cartoon people from the big screen after the stage - this is the long-awaited 29th Olympic Games mascots.
Beijing Olympic Games mascot by five anthropomorphized doll image, collectively known as "Fuwa", respectively, called "Bei Bei", "Jing Jing", "Huanhuan", "Ying Ying" and "Nini". The pronunciation of the five names makes up the harmonic "Beijing welcomes you".
Beibei is a fish swimming in the boundless sea, Jingjing is a panda playing in the dense forest, Yingying is like a Tibetan antelope running in the vast grassland, and Nini is like a light Beijing swallow singing happily in the sky. They clustered around Huanhuan, the Olympic flame symbolizing the Temple of Hera in ancient Olympia, and used their respective names to form the resounding words of the harmonic "Welcome to Beijing", sending out an invitation to children, their siblings and their parents all over the world! The invitation was extended to children, their siblings and their parents all over the world.
The mascots are the newest members of the Olympic family. What kind of note can China, as the representative of Eastern civilization, add to this never-ending Olympic music?
Compared with the 100-year history of the Olympic Games, the mascot is just a new member of the Olympic family. 1972 Munich Olympic Games, a puppy called Vardy as the mascot for the first time in the Olympic Games, and since then, it has become the mascot of many Olympic Games. Since then, the mascot has become one of the core images of many Olympic Games, and is an important vehicle for conveying the Olympic spirit and the concept of the Games. As ambassadors of the Olympic Games, they have appeared widely in various fields of the Olympic Games, coupled with their lovely image and distinctive character, they are loved by people, especially young children, and have become the most popular image of the Olympic Games.
From the recent Olympic Games and other large-scale world events on the choice of mascots, showing from the direct choice of animal images to this as the prototype for the re-creation of the design trend, as well as completely new interpretation of the creation of a new image of the 2000 Sydney Olympics chose their unique three exotic animals - the echidna, the laughing kingfisher, the kingfisher, and the mascot. The 2000 Sydney Olympic Games chose the mascot of their unique three exotic animals - echidna, laughing kingfisher, platypus, representing the earth, water and air. 2004 Athens Olympic Games, Athena and Favors two mascots created based on the ancient Greek myths, with its strong Greek cultural characteristics and lovely shape, won a full applause, and became the most "hot" special commodities in the Athens Olympic Games. The mascots have become the most "hot-selling" special commodities in the Athens Olympic Games. Each Olympic Games will choose the appropriate mascot according to the history and culture of the host country. Each mascot is unique, and they all have dynamic personalities that embody the Olympic ideals of friendship and fair play. The mascot anthropomorphizes the Olympic values, giving them an actual form that is unmatched by any other image in today's Olympic signage system.
The world is once again watching China and looking forward to Beijing! In order to create a mascot that will also be loved by the whole world, on August 5, 2004, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) formally issued an invitation to professional design organizations and design professionals around the world to openly solicit designs for the mascots of the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The call for entries received enthusiastic responses from home and abroad. Can the Olympic mascot be generated from the effective collection of works? It became a question that lingered in the minds of the staff concerned for a long time.
December 1, 2004, 17:05:30 is the final deadline. During this period of nearly four months, the cultural activities department of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, which is responsible for the collection of work, became the busiest place, with telephone calls, postal letters and e-mails pouring in from Beijing, from all over China and from every part of the world. 3,000 pieces of letters and amateur designs, and countless telephone calls to the collection office staff were very busy and happy. After qualification according to relevant regulations, 662 valid entries were confirmed. Among them, 611 works from mainland China, 12 works from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and 39 works from abroad.
The call for entries attracted great creative enthusiasm from Chinese designers. Mainland China, except for two provinces and regions have design organizations and personnel to participate. Overseas Chinese and Chinese students living abroad also sent their works of love. Many foreign designers also paid great attention to this event. Designers from Britain, the United States, Canada and other countries as well as South Korea, Japan, Singapore, India and other countries in Asia also sent their works. Among their works, there are images of pandas, monkey kings, Tibetan antelopes and elk, which are very familiar to the public, as well as many new shapes with distinctive expressiveness and unique styles. The vast majority of the works not only expressed Chinese characteristics, but also absorbed the Olympic Games mascot creation concept.
On December 15, 2004, according to the selection rules for the mascot design of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the Olympic Organizing Committee invited 24 experts and scholars with outstanding achievements in the fields of art and culture both at home and abroad to make an artistic selection of all the valid entries according to the requirements for the mascot design. On that day, in the 16th-floor conference hall of the Beijing Organizing Committee, 662 works were placed flat on the table - from which the judges had to choose 10 works they considered satisfactory.
Painter Pang Bangben, executive vice president of the Chinese Oriental Culture Research Association's comic book and cartoon branch, recalled that the choice was difficult, as many of their favorite images may have thousands of similarities and thus run into trouble when intellectual property rights are checked in the future. Due to the special nature of the mascot, the design also had to reserve space for the future production of materials, mascot animation filming and extensive market development work. As a result, there were many factors to consider during the initial evaluation.
On December 17, 2004, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) held a working meeting of the mascot selection committee. Famous artists Jin Shangyi, Chang Shana and other 10 recommended selection committee to enter the recommended selection stage of the 56 pieces of work for review and comment. Among them, 50 works were selected by the Art Selection Committee and 6 works were nominated by the Recommendation and Selection Committee. After fully analyzing the selected works, the Recommendation and Selection Committee recommended that six works, namely, the panda, tiger, dragon, Monkey King, rattle drum and Ah Fook, be used as the direction of modification for the mascot of the Beijing Olympic Games.
What made the modification team's task difficult was that each of the pieces had difficulty meeting the requirements of an Olympic mascot. There is no way out, but there is another village in the darkness. The Chinese Fuwa surfaced.
Despite determining the direction of the modification, but can the mascot finally emerge from the six pieces? No one has any idea. On March 11 this year, by the famous artist Han Meilin as the leader of the 9-member modification team, focused on Huairou Yanqi Lake. Their task was to come up with a revised plan for the six works.
The modification team immediately entered the intense work. They went through a lot of graphics around the six pieces of work. 500 sheets of A4 photocopy paper were used up in one morning. They also went through a lot of reference materials to modify the 6 pieces of work from different angles. But the fun ones are not good, and the good ones are the same as the previous ones, so how can they feel out of place?
In the beginning, the recommendation jury was very optimistic about the rattle. They felt that it was a great way to set the mood and that it was fun to play. However, the rattle has no feet and lacks the element of movement, which is a big obstacle in application. After checking and re-checking, it was also found that the mascot chosen by the China Consumers' Association for a major event was the rattle.
The tiger is a good image, but as a single mascot, it has already been used in the 1988 Seoul Olympics; the panda is an image praised both in China and abroad, but because it has been used too much, there is very limited room for re-creativity; the Monkey King is a household name in China, but it is also difficult to get a breakthrough in styling; the concept of the Chinese dragon is very hard and tough, but it has the characteristics of kingship and royalty, and has a lesser degree of affinity, and its image is not very good in the eyes of some Westerners. some Westerners' eyes the image is not very good either. The Afu Daitouwa consists of a bunch of rounded little clay figures, also without feet, and shows a strong concept of regionality. The modification team also made combinations of six pieces, such as putting a panda, the Monkey King and a tiger together, but the forms and color combinations didn't look very good.
An important part of the modification process was that the experts felt that a single piece was not enough to fulfill the design requirement that the mascot have a comprehensive meaning. The modification process was bogged down. Government-supported campaigns in various parts of the country added to the sense of responsibility felt by members of the revision team.
Leaders of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, while comforting and encouraging them, suggested that they could break out of the six-artwork box and boldly try to redesign the design.
This idea inspired the members of the revision team, who re-read the finalists and realized that a work consisting of five animals had conceptual merit. So the group centered their thinking around the word "five". There are five rings in the Olympics, five elements in China, five continents in the world, five directions, "Five Fortunes", "Five Sons" and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so forth, and so on.
It was also on this day - March 22, 2005, a group of five mascot creation of ideas first set down. The Chinese Fuwa took shape.
Han Meilin's studio was filled almost entirely with mascot graphics. Several mascot shapes competed, and in the end, Jingyan surpassed the dragon.
After a brief period of rejoicing, the group moved to Han Meilin's studio at the China Artists Association in the Tongzhou district.
What image would make it into the "five"? This is really hard to say, some want antelope, some want monkeys, some want Sichuan pandas, and want to add the elk, albino dolphins, dragons and so on. The Olympic mascot history does not have five, even if there are five can not accommodate so many people hope. Who better to choose has become a difficult question.
Han Meilin recalled: "I thought, China's big-headed doll is not quite good, hat is not also quite good? Let's link the hat with the mascot, so that you can wear a tiger hat as well as a panda hat. Later, we worked on that and sketched out a first draft. Five dolls came out. It represents the five elements of gold, wood, water, fire and earth, incorporating the water patterns of Chinese colored pottery, bronze culture, etc., and the fire is using the graphics of Dunhuang murals." Han Meilin remembers this very well. He said he took a cool bath that morning and took two heart pills in one day, just to make a big effort to come up with ideas.
Those days were characterized by heated discussions and even arguments; and by silence and work. Every part of the graphic was pored over, adding as many Chinese cultural elements as possible. Wu Guanying, deputy director of the Department of Graphic Design at Tsinghua University's School of Fine Arts, said that the information looked around at the time, with ordinary book bags more than 70 packages, enough to fill a van. In order to find information, ten days he ran from Haidian to Tongzhou more than 50 times.
Experienced three months, drew tens of thousands of, modified sixty or seventy times, April 5, 2005, the five shape is basically finalized. When the leaders of the Olympic Organizing Committee saw this work, they said, "We have seen the light. With these words, the hearts of the members of the revision team, which had been hanging in the air for a long time, fell to the ground like a stone. This is everyone's credit, this is the result of brainstorming, this is the crystallization of collective wisdom. Han Meilin said that modification is a process of re-creation. Without the 662 finalists and the experience of revising six works, Fuwa would have been difficult to come out.
On April 29, the 53rd executive committee of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) finalized the revision of the mascot program, and concluded that the concept of "Chinese children" (sacred fire, panda, fish, Tibetan antelope and dragon) has Chinese characteristics, and that the selection of a group of images representative of Chinese culture as the mascot of the Beijing Olympics can meet the expectations of all walks of life for the mascot. expectations of the mascot. During the "May 1" period, Han Meiwei was invited to participate in the Beijing Olympic Games as a mascot. During the period of "May 1", Han Meilin further revised and improved the program of "China Baby" according to the spirit of the Executive Committee and the modification opinions from all walks of life. Considering the fact that the image of the dragon is divided in the West, he proposed to replace the dragon with the traditional Beijing kite "Jingyan". In terms of presentation method, combining the brush strokes of the Olympic bid emblem and the style of the Chinese seal of the Olympic emblem, boldly adopting the hand-painting technique of traditional Chinese ink painting, the five dolls were re-sketched, highlighting the mascot's lively character traits, and making a significant breakthrough in the artistic expression of the overall image. At this point, the basic image positioning of the Beijing Olympic mascot is basically complete.
Wilbruggen, an old friend of the Beijing Organizing Committee and president of the IOC Coordination Commission, chose August 18th. He knew that it was a date considered auspicious by the Chinese, and he rushed to send a letter of confirmation of the mascot to the Beijing Organizing Committee on that day.
On June 9, the 54th executive committee of the Beijing Organizing Committee considered and approved the revised mascot plan, giving the group a general name: China Fuwa.
August 17, the IOC Coordination Commission Working Group listened to the Beijing Organizing Committee's report on the design of the mascot for the Beijing Olympic Games, and on August 18, the President of the Coordination Commission, Mr. Verbruggen, wrote a letter confirming the IOC's approval of the Beijing Olympic Games mascot design.
The mascot design has been officially approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Because the mascot is the core image of the Olympic Games, it is also the core element among the landscape elements of the image of an Olympic Games, and it is also an image with great commercial development value. So it is necessary to carry out legal protection work. This protection in addition to the completion of the domestic, but also in the International Olympic Committee, with the assistance of overseas, especially in several major countries one by one for registration and implementation of legal protection measures. During the pre-validation process, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) conducted a large number of industrial and commercial registrations and legal inquiries. This work was successfully completed at the end of October.
The mascot of the Beijing Olympics is innovative, and it has been widely praised by all sectors of society and has become a good friend of children.
The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games did not work behind closed doors during the entire process of creating and revising the mascot. In order to understand the children's and young people's recognition and love for the Beijing Olympic Games mascot candidates, on April 22, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games interviewed and tested 49 third-grade students of elementary school in Beijing Yucai Primary School and 22 kindergarten children in the middle and older classes of the Happy Time Kindergarten in Beijing by means of a questionnaire survey. The results showed that 98% of the children thought the five dolls were very cute and considered them to be good friends or family. Many of the children even gave them names, and some immediately asked, "Where can I buy them?"
A few days later, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) organized a mascot evaluation meeting, inviting the National People's Congress (NPC), the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the Municipal People's Congress (CPC), the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the Democratic Party members, the experts in Olympic studies, as well as representatives of athletes, designers and other people from all walks of life, to deliberate on the mascot candidates. The representatives of the evaluation gave a high evaluation to the organization of the mascot design collection, and considered that the organization was tight, the operation was reasonable, and the confidentiality of the mascot design collection was focused on listening to the opinions of all parties.
The vast majority of the delegates affirmed the mascot candidates, saying that the group of works is creative and novel, cleverly conceived, vividly modeled and distinctive, and that the idea of choosing a group of images instead of a single image as the mascot of the Beijing Olympic Games meets the expectation of people from all walks of life for the Beijing Olympic Games; the candidates have a strong flavor of Chinese culture; they are relatively complete in terms of creativity and styling, and embody the Chinese style, national sentiment and modernity, and reflect the Chinese style, national sentiment and modernity, and embody the Chinese culture and culture.
The candidate program has a strong Chinese cultural flavor; it is more complete in creativity and modeling, reflecting the Chinese style, ethnicity, modernity, and the harmony between human beings and nature; and there is a certain breakthrough compared with the previous Olympic Games.
The mascot of the 29th Olympic Games has made a breakthrough in the design of Olympic mascots, and has won the unanimous praise of Chinese and foreign experts.
A person in charge of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games believes that, compared with the mascots of previous Olympic Games, China Fuwa has several innovations and breakthroughs. First of all, in terms of design ideas, the first time to combine animals and people perfectly. China Fuwa for the first time to combine people themselves and animals, emphasizing the concept of humanistic Olympics, highlighting the people-oriented.
Secondly, it is the first time that the elements of the Olympic Games are directly integrated into the mascot in the design concept. Because every Olympic mascot has to show the Olympic spirit, and we directly refer to the Olympic elements, such as fire baby, from the Olympic flame.
The third breakthrough is in the mascot design application, highlighting the extension of the use of personalization. The mascot consists of two parts, headdress and body, is a complete image, but the headdress part can be taken down completely, separate development and production. Every adult and every child can put their favorite "hat" on their head and dress up as a mascot. This kind of application is not in the past, the interaction between people and mascots has been enhanced.
Finally, Beijing is the first time in the history of the Olympic Games that there have been five mascots, which is the most in the history of the Games. That's because Chinese culture is so profound and has so much to express.
Sun Lijun, dean of the animation school at the Beijing Film Academy, said the Beijing Olympics mascot has several characteristics, one is that its shape comes from life, from the people. It has to be cute and likeable, from small preschoolers to adults and even the elderly. The second is to have Chinese characteristics. Thirdly, it should be suitable to do a variety of derived things, can do cartoons, can do toys, can be modeled, can be active, can be used in large-scale scenes. In addition, every Chinese people love good luck, mascot should represent the heart of the Chinese people, different levels of the people like.
662 effective works, each is a fine line, and five groups of Chinese Fuwa produced, is a thousand fine lines twisted into a rope. Beijing Olympic Games mascot, is the crystallization of collective wisdom.
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