Yesterday I attended the first day of the UK Cinema Showcase, previewing some upcoming movies. I’d been stuck in the cinema for most of the day, so hadn’t realized that just around the corner the Piccadilly Circus Circus was going on. For the entire day (well, from 1pm on) Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street and Piccadilly Street had 143 circus performances of 48 different acts by 33 companies with 247 performers!

I got out the cinema at about 8pm and thought I could take the tube from Piccadilly Circus; I had no idea what I was walking into. There was a huge crowd around Piccadilly Circus and music was playing loudly. I initially didn’t understand what was going on until I looked up: above the square there were several zipwire lines and people dressed as angels doing acrobatic acts. This video gives a good idea of some of the bits I saw:

The finale though was the most amazing! They’d already released some feathers during the performance, but in the finale they went all out: tons of feathers got thrown over the crowd and burst from canons on the side. It was just raining feathers everywhere. And to be in the middle of it all was so surreal:

I now really wished I had seen more of the performances during the day. But experiencing that finale? WOW.

Awesome:

Awesome:

I love that during some of the closeups of Olympic athletes you can see their awesome nail art! I’d love to be creative and do pretty stuff on my nails, but I really do not have the talent (or stable hands) for that.

One of my favourite nail blogs has shared a couple of tutorials to how you can create those flags yourself, so I’m quite tempted to try it out (even though I’m 90% sure I’ll fail completely).

The Australian Flag:

Olympic Rings

The British Flag for all my UK readers:

The American Flag for all my US readers:

The German Flag for my German readers and readers from countries with a 3 banded flag, like the Dutch (I’m pretty sure you could just apply the same tutorial there):

Awesome time lapse of building the main Olympic Stadium in Lego:

The guy who did this (Warren Elsmore) actually created the entire park in Lego and it’s currently on display by Visit Denmark at the St Katherine Docks. Here are some photos from his Flickr set:

I got invited to a screening of this short movie BOY a couple of months ago and then somehow completely forgot to write about it. It’s such a moving short movie though, and now with the Olympics it seems like the right moment to revisit it.

It was written and directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, one of the winners of British Airways’ Great Britons programme, which offered a once in a lifetime opportunity for three talented individuals in film, food and art.

Forget everything you thought you knew about strength
Forget everything you thought you knew about humans
It’s time to do battle
Meet the Superhumans

Brilliant: