Two Gold Wins, One Great Year: Post Machine on the BBC Sport Campaigns

We're proud to have played a part in two campaigns that took home Gold at the Creative Circle Awards 2026 — BBC Sport's Women's Euros 'Names Will Be Made' and Winter Olympics 'Trails Will Blaze', both created by BBC Creative.

Both campaigns won Gold in their categories — Animation: Characters & Creatures for Names Will Be Made, and Animation: Lens-Based Animation for Trails Will Blaze. The wins belong to the BBC Creative team who conceived and produced these films. Our part was on the key art and campaign finishing that carried each story beyond the film itself — and we're genuinely proud of the work either way.

Trails Will Blaze

Trails Will Blaze, BBC Sport's Winter Olympics campaign, pushed stop-motion animation even further — 700 individually 3D-printed athletes, real fire, and scale models of the Italian Dolomites, all combined to capture the trails athletes blaze as they push the limits of their sports.

This one we were involved in earlier and more broadly — key art design, compositing, and final retouching and grading, bringing together the physical elements of the shoot into a single, finished campaign image capable of carrying the scale and intensity of the film itself.

Names Will Be Made

Names Will Be Made set out to change how female footballers are seen — built around the stat that women players are far less recognised than their male counterparts, the film brought that ambition to life through stop-motion animation, hand-crafted from over 100 kilograms of clay.

Our role was on the key art: retouching the main campaign image, then adapting it across the full range of sizes the campaign needed to run in — from large format down to social. Keeping a stop-motion, hand-crafted look consistent and sharp across that many formats without it feeling flattened or over-polished was the real challenge here — the texture of the clay is a huge part of why the film works, and that had to survive every crop.

Why this matters to us

Retouching and finishing work is, by nature, meant to be invisible — if we've done our job well, nobody looking at the final key art thinks about what it took to get there. Seeing two campaigns we contributed to recognised at this level is a good reminder of what that unseen work adds up to.

Congratulations to the whole BBC Creative team on two very well-earned Golds. We're looking forward to more work like this.