Red Bull, Worldwide

Stadium & venue banners have been part of what we do here at Grizzle for years now. Hundreds of projects, dozens of venues, across multiple continents. The scale ranges from small community grounds to some of the biggest stadiums in the world.

Having spent a decade working with Red Bull across player graphics, player announcements, promotional content and more, moving into stadium banners felt like the natural next step in the relationship. We know the brand inside out. When the brief shifted to large-scale LED environments, we were already well placed to take it on. Being a studio that understands both the creative and the mathematical demands of working at stadium scale, we didn’t need much convincing.

The core ask was straightforward: create a 3D motion graphics piece built around the Red Bull logo, brand colours and the tagline, Red Bull gives you wings. The idea being to establish a solid base, then expand and adapt it across whatever resolutions each individual stadium needs.

Red Bull supply us with the technical specs for each venue, which is where things get interesting. We understand resolutions, that part’s fine. The specs themselves, however, don’t always arrive in English. Google Translate has been consulted more than a handful of times to work out the finer details of placement. Some of these banners sit just above 2,000px in width. Others push to 14,000px. And then there are the extreme ones, a few of which have come in at 32,000px wide.

That last category created a specific problem worth mentioning. When a request came in above 30,000px, we quickly discovered that H264 .MP4 files top out at around that threshold. After sitting down and putting our heads together, we dove head first into getting an understanding of FFmpeg to handle anything above that ceiling, exporting the final renders out of Cinema 4D before stitching everything together Adobe After Effects, render it out as a .MOV, then finally funnel that through FFmpeg. A solution we’ve used many times at this point, and will continue to use to make sure we’re hitting these specifications bang on

From there, a testing phase kicks in where the banners are deployed to the stadium and/or venue in a test state and we receive footage back from the ground staff. Adjustments are made from there. The 3D work produced is made fully remote for out HQ in Sheffield, which is the nature of operating across this many countries and stadiums at any given time. As much as it’d be good to be pitchside in Austria one week and Australia the next, getting test footage back is what keeps everything aligned and playing as intended.

Worth pulling back the curtain for a moment. Here’s test footage from a breakdancing qualifier held in Thailand, 8+ screens in total alongside a set of LED cylinder pillars. Making sure everything reads consistently across that many surfaces is a back-and-forth process. We get the footage back from the venue and work through it from there.

And here’s the final, deployed and live at the venue.

What’s sitting in this case study is a select few from a much larger collection we’ve built up over the years. The variations run deep: stadiums, languages, can types, colourways, sport types spanning football, rugby, bouldering and more. The list genuinely does go on. The brief stays consistent. The world it gets applied to keeps expanding.

For those of you who like your stats, over the past few years we’ve covered stadium capacities ranging from a few thousand seats up to north of 50,000, across venues in Austria, France, Australia, Thailand, the USA and several more stops in between.