How NOMINT and BBC Creative torched the Winter Olympics

Behind the blazing aftershocks and fiery energy of the BBC's Winter Olympics film, Trails Will Blaze, lies a painstakingly hands-on process. 

A spectacle built on miniature worlds, physical materials, and a willingness to let unpredictable elements do some of the heavy lifting (yikes!), the film is a result of meticulous planning, over a month of testing and a creative team comfortable with courting risk.

To work out how the shoot came together, and figure out the mindset behind taking on the challenge, shots caught up with NOMINT director and founder Yannis Konstantinidis and BBC Creative's Paul Bailey to ask them what fueled the flames.

When the Winter Olympics brief first landed, what was the initial creative ambition for the campaign, and how did you arrive at the “Trails Will Blaze” concept?

Paul Bailey - Sn Creative at BBC Creative: We wanted to celebrate the record-breaking, boundary-pushing athletes of the Winter Olympics. 

The film is all about athletes pushing the limits of human capability, so it only felt right to create something tangible, made by human hands. 

They are trailblazers, and that word instantly opened up a striking visual world of athletes blazing literal trails of fire through the frozen landscape of the Dolomites.

This could easily have become a VFX-led film. Why was it important that it felt tangible and handmade, and what made stop-motion the right route?

PB: The film is all about athletes pushing the limits of human capability, so it only felt right to create something tangible, made by human hands. 

And boy did Yannis and the NOMINT team push the limits of animation.

At what point did you know you needed a specialist partner, and what was it about Yannis’ work that made NOMINT the right fit?

PB: We kept coming back to NOMINT’s painstakingly beautiful WWF work and the way Yannis used the medium itself to tell the story. He’s as much an engineer as he is a director. 

And just the right amount of crazy to take on such an ambitious project in a very tight timeframe!

Above: Konstantinidis’ WWF animations – Can’t Negotiate the Melting Point of Ice, A Flammable Planet, Up in Smoke and In Hot Water – each built around volatile, real-world elements.

When BBC Creative brought the idea to you, what was your first reaction, and what did you need to figure out before you could confidently say yes?

Yannis Konstantinidis - Director and Founder, NOMINT: My first reaction was that it felt almost impossible.

It felt impossible not only because of the fire itself, but also because of how ambitious the script was. To do it justice, it had to be executed at the same level of ambition. It was daunting. It was very clear that if we were going to attempt this, we had to go big.

At first, I genuinely wasn’t sure it was achievable. But after sitting with it, we realised that if everyone was willing to commit fully and aim for something bold rather than safe, then we were excited to take that leap and figure out the how along the way.

What did the earliest tests look like, and what did they quickly reveal about what would and wouldn’t be possible in-camera?

YK: Fire, explosions, sparks and combustible materials are volatile and unpredictable, which is the opposite of what stop-motion is normally good at. We knew that from the outset, so we approached it with a very open mindset.

I genuinely wasn’t sure it was achievable.

We dedicated just over a month purely to testing. We worked at Armory FX with specialist technicians who ensured safety and helped us explore different materials and techniques. We were literally playing with fire and observing how different materials behaved.

We started with still photography to understand how it read on camera, then progressed into motion tests tailored to specific shots from the script. Alongside that, we were figuring out frame rates, lighting set-ups and camera settings. By the end of that month, we had a very clear understanding of what the element would allow us to do, and just as importantly, what it wouldn’t.

The glowing trail feels like it’s coming from the athletes rather than being a separate effect. How did you design it so it stayed connected to their movement?

YK: From the beginning, I wanted the fire to illuminate the athletes and create their silhouettes, so that the fire and the character existed as one unified frame. That was crucial.

My approach with uncontrollable elements like fire is to think one frame at a time. What mattered was that it felt alive and present. That philosophy allowed us to shoot the athletes and the fire together in-camera, rather than treating the fire as an overlay or secondary effect.

By letting the fire interact directly with the figures, lighting them and shaping their silhouettes, the trail feels intrinsically linked to their movement rather than added on afterwards.

Above: Images from the creative team's extensive testing sessions.

How did you decide what the athletes’ movement should feel like across the different sports?

YK: We are depicting athletes at the absolute top of their game, people pushing the limits of human performance. But it was equally important that they didn’t feel superhuman.

To achieve that, we went deep into Olympic broadcast archives. Every movement in the film is based on real Olympic footage. We took actual performances and translated them into 3D, refining them only slightly to make them printable and workable for stop-motion.

Some shots used replacement animation with 3D-printed elements, while others, like the close-up of the ice skating boots, were animated traditionally. Everything was grounded in real athletic movement, which helped capture both speed and precision without exaggeration.

How did you approach designing and building the miniature world, and what did physical scale let you do?

YK: We used multiple scales throughout the production. Most of the action was shot at around 1:24 scale, with larger scales introduced when we needed more detail, and a much bigger scale for the ice skating boots sequence.

The biggest lesson is that it’s okay to be a little delusional.

I wanted the film to feel miniature, but still cinematic. Playing with scale helped us achieve that. Building everything physically grounded the world in reality, which made the performances and the fire feel more tangible.

Because we were working with real flames, we couldn’t use many of the materials typically used in stop-motion. For some sets, we used kiln lining, which doesn’t burn and visually resembles snow or cotton. It was an unusual and sometimes uncomfortable material to work with, but within the chaos of fire, movement and camera motion, it worked beautifully.

Your WWF films often involve controlling unpredictable elements. What lessons from those projects fed directly into Trails Will Blaze?

YK: The biggest lesson is that it’s okay to be a little delusional. You have to take a leap of faith that things will work, even when the element itself is wild and untameable.

From a practical perspective, you also learn that not all frames are equal. Some frames take minutes, others take hours, and that’s fine. On this project, some frames took exceptionally long because we needed consistency across movement, even though the fire itself was unpredictable.

A good example is the skeleton sequence around the mountain. We needed the fire trail to form a clean circular movement, which meant carefully light-painting the fire frame by frame until the shape felt right. It takes patience, experience and trust to know when to keep pushing and when to move on.

Above: BBC Creative's Behind the Scenes micro-doc.

On a practical level, what were the biggest challenges of shooting sparks and flame frame-by-frame, and how did you keep things repeatable?

YK: Continuity was the biggest challenge. Not whether it was possible, but whether it was realistic within the constraints of a commercial shoot. We accounted for that early, so it never became unmanageable.

Creatively, the priority was that the fire felt wild and alive. Each sport needed its own character. Skiing was about power and speed, curling was about accuracy and control. We used different fire techniques to reflect that.

We combined static flame effects, sparks and light painting, often layering multiple techniques within the same frame. Sometimes this was done in-camera, sometimes through compositing different passes of the same frame. The goal was never a single uniform fire effect, but a living, shifting language of fire across the film.

What’s one moment where something didn’t behave as planned, and how did you solve it without losing the idea?

YK: Early on, I was very excited about using a robotic arm to light-paint the skeleton’s route around the mountain using a gas line. On the day it became clear that the system couldn’t give us the precise shape we needed.

The goal was never a single uniform fire effect, but a living, shifting language of fire across the film.

So I made a decision to abandon the robotic approach. Instead, we built a steel track around the mountain in the exact shape we wanted and manually light-painted the fire along it.

It ended up being a blessing in disguise. That day became one of the most collaborative and enjoyable shoots, with the whole team gathered around the set, taking turns shaping the fire with pocket bellows. It was messy, physical and incredibly satisfying.