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Winter Olympic Games Milan Cortina 2026

a legacy continued, pushed to the edge

The Olympic Games are one of the most enduring symbols of global spectacle. For the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, NBC Sports challenged us to craft a title sequence that went beyond pageantry and cinematic scale—one that captured the risk, volatility, and razor-thin margins that define winter sport. These are disciplines where speed, gravity, and ice collide; where a single miscalculation can end a career. The challenge was not just to show beauty, but to make audiences feel the exhilaration that lives on the edge of danger, set against the romance and architectural grandeur of Milan.

Being invited back after the record-breaking Paris 2024 broadcast that drew over 100 million viewers during its opening weekend, marked a meaningful milestone for our studio. More importantly, it signaled the continuation of a creative partnership built on trust, ambition, and a shared belief in the emotional power of sports storytelling. NBC Sports continues to redefine how the Games are experienced, championing cinematic language alongside the raw, unscripted intensity of live competition. We’re deeply grateful for their trust and for the opportunity to help carry the Olympic story forward—from Paris to Milan Cortina and beyond.

sixty years in sixty seconds

NBC was clear from the outset: this title sequence shouldn’t feel like a countdown to a single event ceremony. It needed to feel like a continuation of a legacy.

We were granted access to NBC’s vast Olympic archive, decades of moments where the world cheered, cried, and collectively held its breath. The challenge wasn’t simply editorial. Footage spanned from wildly different eras and formats: 4:3 aspect ratios, lower resolutions, aging film stock. Each moment had to be carefully rebuilt. Footage was up-res’d, frames extended, and environments expanded—the crowds, stands, ice rinks, all reconstructed to create a seamless, contemporary experience that honored the past while living fully in the present.

The result is a fluid editorial journey through Olympic history, compressed into sixty seconds that feel unified, emotional, and alive.

a new reality, rendered live

Athletes were filmed in Los Angeles on a volumetric stage, surrounded by immersive digital environments that allowed performance and place to coexist seamlessly. This approach let us move fluidly between reality and cinematic abstraction, grounding the sequence in authenticity while elevating it into something mythic.

Thanks to ILM’s state of the art volumetric stage, we were able to fuse and rebuild the history, architecture, and the beauty of Milan. Working with Unreal Engine, we rebuilt some scenes entirely in CG, treating it not as a backdrop, but as a character which became an emotional counterpoint to the raw physicality of winter sports.

We’re grateful to our partners at ILM, whose collaboration and shared assets helped make this hybrid approach possible.