BBC's "Trails Will Blaze" animates 700 3D-printed athletes with real, in-camera fire

BBC Creative and its production partner Nomint built the Winter Olympics 2026 opening film "Trails Will Blaze" around a stop-motion fire effect the team refused to fake: every flame, spark and glow was shot practically, one exposure at a time, alongside 700 individually 3D-printed puppet athletes animating across a scale model of the Dolomites. Director Yannis Konstantinidis (Nomint) and BBC Creative director Justin Bairamian ran weeks of pre-production burn testing to settle 14 distinct combustion techniques, supervised by specialist pyrotechnics house Armoury FX under SFX supervisor Matthew Strange, before animation began; wherever a flame would touch the set or puppets, standard foam and cotton dressing was swapped for heat-resistant substitutes such as kiln lining. Fire and puppet performance were often captured as separate practical passes on the same locked-off setup and combined afterward without ever regenerating the flame digitally, so every frame of fire the audience sees is a real burn. The film opened the BBC's Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics coverage, scored to a new arrangement of Verdi's Requiem recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The technique behind it is now folded into a new Wiki page, Practical fire effects in stop motion, since this level of process detail rarely survives an ad campaign's original coverage.