BBC's real-fire Winter Olympics film 'Trails Will Blaze' wins Film Craft Grand Clio

The BBC needed a film to launch its Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics coverage in an era of slick, synthetic CGI and AI promos. The brief demanded a visual language as raw, dangerous and physically demanding as the sports themselves.

Show Olympic athletes as forces of nature: stop-motion figures leaving real fire trails, so the film's raw physical craft mirrors the stakes of the Games.

BBC Creative partnered with NOMINT to shoot a stop-motion film set in the frozen landscapes of the Dolomites: 700 individually 3D-printed athletes animated frame-by-frame against scale models of the Italian mountains, using 14 live combustion techniques to create real glowing trails. The soundtrack is a new arrangement of Verdi's Requiem, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus and Crouch End Festival Chorus.

The film became the primary visual hook for the BBC's Winter Games coverage across linear and digital platforms, won the Film Craft Grand Clio at the 2026 Clio Awards and a One Show 2026 Gold Pencil in Craft/Animation.

In January 2026 the BBC unveiled 'Trails Will Blaze', its film for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Set in the frozen landscapes of the Dolomites and inspired by the Olympic torch, it presents the world's greatest winter athletes as forces of nature, so intense that glowing, fiery trails are left in their wake.

BBC Creative and animation studio NOMINT, directed by Yannis Konstantinidis, built the film from real fire: 700 individually 3D-printed athletes were animated frame-by-frame against scale models of the Italian mountains, with 14 volatile combustion techniques used to produce the fire trails. The music is a new arrangement of Verdi's Requiem, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus and Crouch End Festival Chorus.

The idea answered a strategic insight: audiences have built a 'digital filter' against imagery that feels too perfect or synthetic, so a polished CGI promo would fail to capture the raw, physically demanding stakes of the Games. The film became the BBC's primary visual hook for the Games, won the Film Craft Grand Clio at the 2026 Clio Awards, and took a One Show 2026 Gold Pencil in Craft/Animation.

It made craft the message: real fire and hand-made puppets stood in deliberate opposition to the CGI and AI polish flooding the category.

The scale of the making — 700 3D-printed athletes and 14 combustion techniques — gave the film a story beyond the screen, generating behind-the-scenes coverage of its own.

The idea matched medium to meaning: athletes push the limits of their sports, so the team pushed the limits of stop motion.

Live orchestral Verdi, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, gave an elemental spectacle a human, physical performance to match the visuals.

When an entire category goes synthetic, craft in the opposite direction: real fire, physical puppets and frame-by-frame animation made the risk itself the proof of intent.

The trailer aired across BBC One, Two and iPlayer through the run-up to the Games, with the Crouch End Festival Chorus noting that the music came from the First Night of the BBC Proms 2022. Trade press ran extensive making-of coverage, amplifying the film's handcrafted story. At the 2026 Clio Awards it won the Film Craft Grand Clio, and The One Show awarded it a Gold Pencil in Craft/Animation, crediting NOMINT and BBC Creative jointly. The campaign became a reference point for physical, craft-led broadcast promos in a synthetic-looking era.