The 2026 BRIT Awards Get a Dazzling Remix How NorthHouse turned a music awards show into a feast for the eyes.

Preparing for the 2026 BRIT Awards, the UK’s biggest music awards event, Executive Producer Sally Wood and Production Designer Misty Buckley knew they needed a fresh visual identity to bring the show to life. For the first time in the event’s history, it would take place in Manchester, at the Co-op Live Arena. Visuals would have to serve both in-arena audience and viewers at home, while managing to incorporate a complex stage design complete with kinetic towers, a vast panoramic backwall, and a series of floor and podium screens. That meant nine distinct surfaces in total, plus broadcast visuals.

Fortunately, the creative studio NorthHouse was up to the challenge, with over 14 years specializing in visual design for live experiences. NorthHouse dreamed up four distinct visual palettes—Earth, Water, Bionic, and Fire—that provided plenty of variety while also tying the whole production together. The visual ecosystem combined Notch, Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine, EmberGen, and After Effects, handling playback via Disguise servers.

The result was a smashing success, as the show broke several broadcast records and saw a 400% increase in Instagram views from the previous year. The NorthHouse team generously chatted with us to break down how they pulled off this impressive technical and creative feat.

NorthHouse: For the first time in its history, the BRIT Awards were taking place in Manchester. We wanted to create a fresh aesthetic for this new chapter and bring the UK’s biggest night in music to the Co-op Live arena.

Inspired by the set’s futuristic “space station” concept and developed in close collaboration with Misty Buckley, the team created a visual ecosystem blending modern futurist features with overgrown environments, marking a shift in the show's visual language.

This ambitious stage design had to work seamlessly for both the live arena audience and national broadcast. Each of the four visual ecosystems was defined by a bold, distinctive color palette, creating instantly recognizable visual environments that could shift the atmosphere of the show while maintaining a unified identity with the stage design. These environments were used as house looks throughout the broadcast and informed the design of nomination packages, while separate visual themes were developed for individual artist performances.

The result was an awards show with a strong sense of identity, creating a distinctive and cohesive visual world across the physical stage, broadcast, and digital platforms. It also marked a bold new era for the BRITs.

NorthHouse: Working closely with the wider production team and tools like Maxon and Adobe, our team created a cohesive visual system spanning nine LED surfaces across the stage environment, including a vast panoramic back wall, kinetic towers, and a series of floor and podium screens. In total, the project worked with a combined canvas of 91 megapixels.

Another consideration was to create a cohesive visual language across all these independent surfaces of varying scale, position, and resolution, ensuring that media could flow seamlessly across the entire stage environment and introduce a sense of depth that blurred the boundaries between the physical stage and screen design.

The team needed to consider the transparency of the kinetic lighting towers' screens, which, being particularly dynamic, introduced compositional considerations, requiring media to work in dialogue between the lighting rig, the back wall behind and the rest of the architecture. All LED surfaces were ROE Visual panels, ranging from 2.8mm pitch on the closedown to 8.9mm on the semi-transparent Vanish towers, with ROE Black Marble across the floor.

All media needed to be fully pre-rendered. As this was an award show rather than a generative live performance, the priority was maximum visual quality and reliability. The pipeline spanned Cinema 4D, Unreal, Red Giant, VFX Suite, Universe, Redshift, and After Effects, with renders submitted overnight to a Deadline render farm. Custom Python scripts automated output formatting and pixel map conversion using FFmpeg, significantly reducing manual preparation for each surface. Live camera feeds were integrated directly through Disguise, with no external compositing engine in the chain.

NorthHouse: Screen resolutions keep getting bigger, and the BRIT Awards 2026 presented a fantastic challenge in resolution and workflow. The back wall measured 13,312 by 2,816 pixels across 52 meters by 11 meters, while the closedown stretched to 20,736 by 1,433 pixels at 54 meters wide. Each surface had its own pixel map, format, position, and aspect ratio. These required precise formatting and delivery without a single pixel misalignment across the stage.

Previsualization was central to both this process and workflow, particularly given the tower geometry and how it interacted with the back wall visuals across different audience sightlines. Within our custom-built previsualization environment, the team could analyze scale and image quality from all the viewing angles of the arena and broadcast camera perspectives. Beyond this, the volume of deliverables created a significant pipeline challenge. With nine surfaces requiring individually formatted media packages, manual exporting and conversion would have been both time-prohibitive and error-prone at this scale.

Disguise's multi-server clustering capability was central to managing the total output load. A stack of 9x GX3+ and 2x GX3 formed a unified session which distributed 91 megapixels across multiple servers, maintaining synchronized, frame-accurate playback across all surfaces. Each surface was assigned its own optimized pixel map for precise geometric mapping without compromising output quality. NotchLC codec ingestion ensured the highest quality pre-rendered media at scale without unnecessary transcoding overhead.

The scale and modularity of the stage presented a beautifully unique challenge, particularly with the varied screen surfaces and automations. Keeping this in mind during the early design phase, the team decided that certain elements, such as the closedown and the towers, would benefit from a more physical and textural quality.

This led to the development of lenticular glass as a core visual motif, a modern and sophisticated ‘material’ that brought a sense of depth, texture and sophistication, while allowing the team to distort and blend imagery. Its versatility meant it could translate effectively across multiple moments in the show, creating a consistent visual thread.

NorthHouse: The closing tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. 

Tom Bairstow, Founder: It was incredible to create something so impactful for a true icon of the music industry, working closely with Patrick Woodroffe and with an amazing collection of archive images also curated by Sharon Osbourne. It was a powerful way to close the show and fully utilize the screen design. It required a shift from the show’s atmospheric visual language to something far more dynamic!

NorthHouse: Performed by Robbie Williams alongside a supergroup including Zakk Wylde, Adam Wakeman, Robert Trujillo and Tommy Clufetos, the tribute celebrated Ozzy’s Lifetime Achievement Award with an incredible level of energy. Designing visuals to match that intensity while honoring such a legend made it a particularly special experience for the team.

Tom Bairstow: It’s a huge moment for the UK and the international music scene. Live music events are the heart and soul of NorthHouse, and, despite our projects now being incredibly varied across the experience and entertainment industry, live music will always remain very close to the heart, so it’s just so incredible to play such a big part in this show in particular.

NorthHouse: Response to the show is always a big factor. The BRITs have had record-breaking stats for viewership this year, and we've had a lovely response from clients and collaborators including Sally Wood, Phil Heyes, Misty Buckley, and Patrick Woodroffe.

NorthHouse: Live music is where NorthHouse began, and it's always been at the heart of our studio. That legacy continues to shape how we approach every project, creating visual experiences that amplify story, music, and space with both artistry and technical precision—and usually at a large scale!

Our work has naturally expanded into immersive destinations, permanent installations, and themed entertainment. While we had previously collaborated on the BRIT Awards in 2023, this project marked the first time the studio was responsible for delivering the full visual package across the entire show.

Some other iconic cultural moments we helped shape include:

• Illuminating Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for major Royal events, including The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and The King's Coronation.

• Delivering visuals for major global music moments, including the Eurovision Song Contest and tours of leading artists spanning diverse genres and contexts.

• Bringing Disney castles and theatres to life in Paris, Los Angeles and Riyadh.

• Amplifying global sporting spectacles, including the Super Bowl Halftime Show, UEFA European Championships, Club World Cup and Rugby World Cup.

• Shaping global events and brand installations for organizations including the Gates Foundation, Ferrari, YouTube, and PlayStation.

Key Takeaways

• Creative studio NorthHouse created an elaborate visual ecosystem for the 2026 BRIT Awards.

• Using Notch, Cinema 4D, Red Giant, Unreal Engine, EmberGen, and After Effects, they crafted four distinct visual palettes across the physical stage, broadcast, and digital platforms.

• The production was a smashing success, breaking several broadcast records and quadrupling social engagement from the previous year.