Exclusive Unseen Birds Nest Fireworks Footage Beijing Olympics 2008

Let’s say you have to job of setting up the world’s biggest fireworks display for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Chinese Olympics what would you do...… easy, practice, practice, and more practice.

With over four billion people watching, that’s 15% of the world’s population, and your countries reputation at stake you really don’t want to get it wrong, with stress levels higher than the fireworks themselves the show was put together piece by piece, approx. 35,000 pieces of pyro made up the show.

The opening of the Beijing Olympics costing a staggering $100,000,000 (that’s $8000 a second).

Peter, a good friend of Epic Fireworks, was given the mammoth task.

Planning for the pyro display started even before the “Birds Nest stadium” was completed; literally, thousands of man hours went into the display.

The stadium construction costing a whopping 423,000,000 US Dollars and taking over five years to construct, this was a task of truly EPIC proportions.

The ground was broken on the 24th December 2003 and completed bang on schedule, (no pun intended) being officially opened 28th June 2008, well in time for the ceremony starting with a very precise timing of 8 seconds past 8 on the 8th of the 8th 2008, (08-08-08-08-08).

The number “8″ is the favourite number for Chinese as it is pronounced as “Fai” - means rich in Chinese.

Leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (picture above) was the artistic consultant on the project.

The stadium consists of two independent structures, standing 50 feet apart, 24,000 tons of steel were used for the roof alone.

The exclusive video footage and photographs below shows the original “testing” months before the official show.

So sit back, put up your feet and enjoy.