Who Is Joris Corthout?
Joris Corthout is a founder who treats pixels the way an old-world goldsmith treats metal. He has been running Prismax for twenty years, and the company's current output is the kind of thing most people assume takes a Hollywood studio and a year of render time: a 16,000-by-16,000 real-time show at the Las Vegas Sphere, synchronized to the lasers and pyro on stage, pushed by his team in Belgium with their hands on the controls.
Joris is the Co-founder and CEO of Prismax, a Belgian visual studio that builds real-time 3D worlds for the biggest live events on the planet. Prismax is the team behind the main stage visuals for Tomorrowland, the Formula One opening, Alicia Keys in a fully virtual environment, the Dota 2 International, and the Sphere show in August 2026. Before Unreal Engine, Prismax spent nearly two decades making event visuals the old-school way, in After Effects and Cinema 4D, rendering frames one at a time.
What makes Joris interesting is not the gear list, it is the taste. He is the rare technical founder who, when asked where AI falls short, does not reach for a product roadmap. He reaches for a leaf. "If we make mountains with lots of small leaves, every small leaf stays the same small leaf," he says. In a game engine, the leaf stays put when the camera moves. In an AI generated frame, "the consistency of millions of leaves being in one shot, it cannot keep the same consistency." He sees the leaf. Most people do not.
The Archetype: The Craftsman
The Creator
The Showman
Tests & Allies
Joris's primary archetype is The Craftsman. His secondary archetype is The Showman. Everything about how he builds, from the way he describes a sinus-shaped set to the way he refuses to automate a Tomorrowland show, comes from someone whose default motion is to make the object beautiful at a level most people cannot see, and then put it in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands.
Craftsmen are not perfectionists in the modern self-help sense. They are people for whom the standard of a job is set by the material, not the market. Joris talks about Unreal Engine, LED pixel pitch, polygon counts, and lighting data flow with the same tone a cabinetmaker uses when they talk about grain direction. The specifics are the point. Shortcuts leave fingerprints, and he can see every one.
"We always try to do something new, something that nobody has ever done before, and using game technology to do so," he says. That sentence sounds like a slogan until you watch him explain, unprompted, that real pyro signals from the fireworks operator get piped into Unreal Engine so the virtual flames fire on the same frame as the real ones. The craft is in the sync. The audience never thinks about it. He does, every night.
The Hero Match
Hephaestus
Hephaestus was the Greek god of fire, forge, and craftsmanship: the one who built Achilles's shield, Zeus's thunderbolts, the automatons that waited on the gods at Olympus, and the mechanical golden maidens who could speak. He was the maker on Olympus, and the other gods needed him for the objects that defined their power. He also worked at a human scale that the other gods did not understand. He was the god who sweated.
Joris maps to Hephaestus on three specific counts. First, the forge. Prismax's work is physical in a way most software is not: 16K LED walls, pixel pitches measured in tenths of a millimeter, Nvidia farms running in sync, rooms whose walls are 100 percent screen. The output is not a file. It is a space you stand inside. That is Hephaestus's shield, scaled to a festival. Second, the mechanical maidens. Hephaestus built things that seemed alive, and Joris's whole business is virtual worlds that respond to real inputs: weather feeds, fireworks triggers, laser cues, a conductor's baton. The world moves because the real world moves. Third, Hephaestus never stopped being a maker even after he was crowned. Joris has been CEO for 20 years and he still describes polygon budgets with the specificity of someone who, if the team shrank to one person tomorrow, would be fine at the keyboard.
Willy Wonka
For a modern hero match, Joris is Willy Wonka. Not the comic Wonka of the marketing posters, the precise one: a maker who built a factory, kept the method secret, insisted on hand-crafted process, and designed every room as a complete sensory experience that could not be reproduced by a competitor who understood only the ingredients. Wonka cared about what the chocolate tasted like in your mouth, not what it looked like in a photograph.
Joris cares about what the Alicia Keys show felt like in the room, not what it reduces to on a phone screen. He cares about the fact that her bespoke piano, which was too heavy to ship, got remodeled in 3D so precisely that viewers still thought it was real. He cares that nothing on a Tomorrowland main stage is time-coded, because time-coded shows "look very nice, but they look very fake." Wonka would understand that sentence immediately. The whole point of a chocolate room is that the chocolate is real.
The Story Behind Prismax
For almost two decades, Prismax was a specialist graphics studio for the entertainment industry. Fashion shows, nightclubs, concerts, anything with a big screen and a live crowd. Joris and his business partner built it from zero to a small, respected eight-person team using the standard pipeline of the era: After Effects, Cinema 4D, render farms, 48-hour turnaround on director notes. The world worked that way. So did they.
Then COVID shut the live-event industry down overnight.
"We were a small company still, eight people, but I really had to start looking like, woof, this is not good," Joris says. "What should we do? When do we go bankrupt even?"
The pivot happened on an evening that reads, in hindsight, like one of those founder stories people invent after the fact. He and his business partner were playing an online game together, as they had been doing most nights for a month, because there was no work. One of them said the obvious thing out loud: we have been playing this game for a month, let us just reinvent ourselves and use the technology we are playing in. Unreal Engine.
They called their biggest client, Tomorrowland. They proposed to rebuild the festival inside Unreal Engine while the real one was cancelled. Tomorrowland said yes. Joris initially pictured one or two stages and maybe ten DJs. What they shipped was eight stages, 100 DJs, two full days of broadcast. The virtual festival worked. The company did not go bankrupt. And the pipeline flipped.
When live events came back, Prismax did not go back to After Effects. They stayed in the game engine and reframed the entire company around a simple idea: run visuals on the biggest screens in the world in real time, in true 3D, manipulable on the spot, synchronized to everything that happens on stage. The pivot was initially a survival move. It became the whole product.
The Founder's Journey and The Company's Journey
Graphics artist and entrepreneur in Belgium → cofounded Prismax 20 years ago → built a traditional After Effects and Cinema 4D studio for events → scaled to a core team around eight people → COVID freeze → one-evening pivot to Unreal Engine → rebuilt Tomorrowland virtually in 2020 → kept the game-engine pipeline when events reopened → by 2026 is operating one of the top real-time 3D studios in the world, built the Sphere show, now hiring senior modelers, animators, and C++ engineers.
Event graphics studio in the Adobe era → emergency virtual festival build during COVID → full repositioning around real-time 3D in Unreal Engine → platform for interactive worlds that respond to real-world data (weather, fire cues, light cues, performer input) → highest-resolution real-time show on earth at the Sphere → next bet is an immersive classical music experience with 120 real musicians inside a game-engine world, aiming for a September release.
Both stories are structured by the same Craftsman archetype: pick the hardest material, learn it in public, and keep moving the ceiling. The company is the founder's taste made tangible at stadium scale.
How Joris Leads
Joris owns his decisions and names his people. When he talks about the pivot, it is "me and my business partner." When he talks about the Sphere show, it is "we." When he talks about hiring, it is specific: three new people since we last spoke, including some very good programmers. He does not perform modesty, and he does not perform founder-savior energy either. He describes the work the way a shop foreman does, with the names and the roles attached.
He also leads the way a craftsman leads: by raising the floor on quality and refusing to apologize for it. He will spend extra on hand-pushed shows at Tomorrowland because the audience can feel the difference between a human hitting the button and a timecode firing. He will remodel a piano in 3D because the artist's real instrument is too heavy to ship and he will not accept a close-enough piano on camera. He will say out loud, in an interview, that a lot of AI generated video is "an experiment" and "not there yet" for the resolutions he needs, even while his team actively uses mid-journey, Runway, Grok, HeyGen, and others in the pre-production phase. The craft gets the final word.
Founder Superpowers
Pivoting without abandoning craft
Most companies that pivot abandon the old skills along with the old pipeline. Prismax did the opposite. The team's deep knowledge of lighting, composition, color, and timing (built up over 17 years of After Effects work) is exactly what makes their Unreal Engine output look like Prismax and not like a video-game cutscene. The medium changed. The eye did not. That is a rare pivot: new tool, same taste.
Treating real-time as the actual constraint
Everyone talks about real-time rendering as a feature. Joris talks about it as a creative constraint, and that reframing is the whole business. Real-time means the director can change the lighting of a forest on the spot instead of waiting 48 hours for a render. Real-time means the pyro operator's button triggers virtual flames on the same frame. Real-time means a performer can walk inside the world instead of in front of it. Prismax does not sell "faster renders." It sells a different relationship between the stage and the screen.
Reading the leaf
Joris's lie-detector for AI generated imagery is the small persistent object: the leaf that should stay the same leaf, the hallway lamp that should match the one next to it, the straw that should go into the can and not through the actor's head. This is the eye of a working craftsman, and it is also a very practical business filter. He is not predicting when AI will replace his pipeline. He is naming the specific conditions under which it will, and giving every AI video founder a very clear brief: solve the leaf problem.
What It's Like to Work with Joris
Joris is high-involvement without being loud. He talked for close to an hour at 10 and 11 p.m. his time, laughed easily, sat through live demo-reel narration without losing the thread, and switched languages between craft (polygon counts, LED pitch) and strategy (sustainability of AI inference, pricing of RAM, where the market is going) without a seam. He asks good follow-up questions. He takes his own operation seriously but not solemnly.
He is demanding but not autocratic. He credits his team for the Sphere build. He describes his 3D artists as the limiting factor on quality, not his engineers, which is a very specific kind of respect in a studio that runs on Unreal Engine. He says, about the people around him, that the ones who embrace AI as a tool will be "lots of steps ahead" of their competition, and the ones who are afraid of it should not be. He is honest that his own English is a second language and that Gemini cleans up his emails, which is both practical and the opposite of ego.
"We shouldn't use AI because it's popular," he says. "Use it when it makes sense."
The team he has built reflects him. Small, deep, allergic to shortcuts, loyal to the craft, bilingual in the Adobe era and the game-engine era, pragmatic about new tools, strict about the audience's experience. If you are the kind of engineer or 3D artist who wants to work on the largest real-time canvases on earth and keep your hands on the controls, Prismax is a very specific match.
Why This Matters (For You)
If You're a Founder Building AI Video or Visual Tools
Joris is exactly the buyer you are trying to win, and he just told you what the bar is. Total control and high enough resolution. Consistency across millions of small persistent objects. The ability to render enough frames per second to run in a live show, not a demo clip. The physics of a straw going into a can, not through a face. He is not hostile to AI video. He uses mid-journey, Runway, HeyGen, and Grok today, in production, inside Prismax. He also just agreed to meet with an AI VJ startup that reached out cold. The lesson is not "wait for the technology." It is: ship the leaf. The founders who solve persistence and controllable high-resolution output will have a buyer waiting.
If You're an Engineer Building Real-Time Graphics or Game Infrastructure
The technical approach at Prismax is a case study in treating a game engine as a production tool, not a game. Unreal Engine runs the stage, Nvidia farms run in parallel and in sync, real-world data (fireworks, lasers, weather, performer position) flows in as inputs, and the whole pipeline collapses the old rendering step out of the loop. The insight worth stealing: real-time is not a performance optimization, it is a creative constraint that unlocks interaction with the physical world. If you are building anything in agent memory, live visualization, interactive media, or on-stage AI, the "live inputs plus deterministic engine plus human operators" pattern is a better default than "model generates every frame."
If You're Early in Your Career
Joris's arc is a case study in doing the craft first, then earning the medium shift. He spent nearly two decades on the Adobe pipeline before he ever touched Unreal Engine in production. When COVID forced the move, the taste he had built in After Effects transferred directly, because taste is not tool-specific. If you are early in your career and tempted to chase whichever model shipped yesterday, Joris's path is a reminder that the craft underneath (composition, color, timing, patience with detail) is what will still be yours after the tool stack flips. Learn the eye. The engine will change.
If You're Considering Joining Prismax
Prismax is hiring in Belgium for senior roles: 3D modelers who understand game-engine assets (polygon budgets matter, not just visual fidelity), 3D animators comfortable in Unreal Engine, and C++ and Qt programmers with deep gaming industry experience. The bar is 10-plus years. The upside is the canvas: Tomorrowland, Formula One, the Sphere, and whatever comes next. If you are the kind of senior craftsperson who wants your work seen by 400,000 people in a weekend, and you want a founder who can speak your language down to the polygon, Prismax is a very specific match.