Paralympic games…The Breakdown

How Curious turned a single studio into four sporting worlds for Channel 4’s award-winning Paralympic campaign.

Ahead of the 2024 Paralympic Games, UK broadcaster Channel 4 came to us with a clear mission: challenge the patronising language surrounding disability and sport, and put one truth front and centre.

Paralympians are elite, world-class athletes.

As production partner for Channel 4’s award-winning Considering What? campaign, Curious was tasked with creating four OOH posters showcasing four Paralympic disciplines and the British athletes competing at the very highest level.

The creative concept was ambitious. Our original challenge was to capture multiple sports across multiple environments, each requiring its own production setup.

Our solution? Bring every sport into one controlled studio environment and build the worlds around the athletes in CGI.

One studio. Four sports.

Rather than moving between multiple shoot locations, Curious proposed creating a controlled studio production that gave us the flexibility to capture all four disciplines in one place.

We sourced a studio space large enough to accommodate the scale of the action, then built a production around the specific requirements of each athlete and sport.

But creating convincing OOH imagery wasn’t simply about making the athletes look like they were competing.

They needed to actually compete.

Real athletes. Real performance.

To capture the physicality, determination and intensity required to compete at Paralympic level, we needed genuine athletic performance on set.

Our weightlifter lifted real weights.

The British wheelchair basketball team pushed, tipped and careered around an invisible court (with the sporting environment to be created later in post).

For wheelchair racing, we needed to capture the speed and movement of the athlete authentically, while working within the practical constraints of a studio environment.

That meant designing each shoot around the athletes rather than asking them to fit into a conventional production setup.

Capturing the action from every angle

The physical performance was only part of the challenge.

We needed to capture the athletes’ movements from multiple angles, using bespoke camera rigs and different camera setups designed around each sport.

At the same time, there was another important creative consideration: the athletes’ identities needed to remain obscured.

At the time of production, it wasn’t yet known exactly who would qualify and represent Team GB at the 2024 Paralympic Games.

The imagery therefore needed to communicate the skill, power and athleticism of the competitors without relying on recognisable faces.

It was a production balancing act: capture genuine sporting performance, maintain anonymity and create enough visual information to make the final CGI environments feel completely believable.

From invisible courts to CGI sporting worlds

After two days of shooting in the studio, we had captured all the ingredients we needed.

The athletes and their performances were real. The environments around them weren’t.

Curious took the footage into post-production, creating realistic sporting surfaces and environments in CGI to transform the controlled studio shoot into four distinct Paralympic sporting worlds.

This hybrid approach gave us the best of both worlds: the control and consistency of a studio shoot with the scale and realism of CGI.

It also meant we could create four visually distinct OOH executions without having to build and shoot four separate real-world environments.

From production challenge to award-winning campaign

The resulting campaign went on to receive recognition across the creative and marketing industries, including:

– Bronze Shark for Photography for Print & Outdoor

– Creative Excellence at Campaign’s In-House Agency Awards

– Excellence Awards in two categories at Marketing Week

– Shortlisted for Creative Review‘s 2025 Awards

But for us, the best part of the production wasn’t an award.

It was a helmet.

During the wheelchair racing shoot, Curious bought a prop helmet for the production.

Rather than disappearing into the prop cupboard after wrap, the helmet was kept by the athlete and went on to be used during her race.

For a production team, that’s a pretty special full-circle moment.

The brief was to celebrate elite athletes. We think the fact that one of our props made it onto the track says everything about the people we were lucky enough to work with!