How a COVID Shutdown Forced a 17-Year-Old Studio to Reinvent Itself in Weeks

Before COVID, Prismax was an eight-person graphic studio creating visuals for nightclubs, fashion shows, and festivals using After Effects and Cinema 4D. They’d been doing it for 17 years. Then the entire event industry shut down overnight.

Joris Corthout, who co-founded Prismax 20 years ago in Belgium, remembers the math clearly. No events meant no revenue. “I really had to start looking like, woof, this is not good. What should we do? When do we go bankrupt even?”

What happened next wasn’t a carefully planned strategic pivot. It started with a video game.

The Gaming Session That Changed Everything

Corthout and his business partner were both gamers. With no work coming in, they spent a month playing online together — specifically, games built on Unreal Engine. One evening, the conversation shifted from playing in the engine to working in it.

“We were like, we’ve been playing this game now for a whole month just because there’s no work. Let’s just reinvent ourselves and use the technology that we are playing in right now,” Corthout recalls.

They called Tomorrowland, their biggest client. The pitch was straightforward: your festival can’t happen this year because of COVID. What if we create it virtually, in Unreal Engine? Tomorrowland said yes.

The scope escalated fast. What Prismax expected to be one or two virtual stages with eight to ten DJs became eight stages, 100 DJs, running live for two days. It was a massive undertaking for a team that had never shipped anything in a game engine before. They pulled it off.

Why They Never Went Back

The traditional production pipeline worked like this: build a 3D scene, set up cameras and lighting, then render — a process where GPUs calculate every light bounce, reflection, and shadow. For complex scenes, a single frame could take hours. A director’s feedback meant 48-hour turnaround times.

Real-time rendering in Unreal Engine flipped all of that. Changes became instant. No more rendering queues. No more waiting.

“Before, if we had a big theater show and the director would come in and he would say, ‘I want this forest to be a little bit lighter,’ we would have to change that in our software. And he could come back in 48 hours when it was rendered,” Corthout explains. “Now we can just adjust all the lighting, adjust the textures, whatever parameters, and the result will be instant.”

When live events resumed, Prismax didn’t return to After Effects. They’d accumulated so much expertise in Unreal Engine that the old workflow felt obsolete. Instead, they pushed further — building real-time 3D worlds that could be manipulated live during performances, synchronized with music, pyrotechnics, and lighting rigs.

The Competitive Moat Nobody Expected

COVID forced a technical migration. But the lasting advantage wasn’t just the technology — it was the years of real-time production experience that competitors couldn’t shortcut.

Within a few years of the pivot, Prismax was running the visuals for the Las Vegas Sphere at 16K by 16K resolution, all in real time. They’d built proprietary systems that ingest data from pyrotechnics operators, lighting designers, and DJs, translating physical stage events into synchronized visual responses across massive screens.

“We just started using Unreal Engine game technology in everything we do,” Corthout says. “We started creating lots of immersive experiences with it.”

The team also built a new product category: immersive rooms for ultra-high-net-worth clients. Entire rooms lined with LED walls display real-time 3D worlds — an Alpine landscape with live weather data, a Parisian cityscape, the Amazon forest. The worlds aren’t pre-recorded video. They’re rendered live, influenced by real-world data streams.

The Paradox of Being Too Busy to Pivot Again

Corthout sees the irony in his current position. The COVID shutdown created space for reinvention. Now, with a full pipeline of Sphere shows, Tomorrowland productions, and immersive installations, that space doesn’t exist.

“We’re kind of stuck in it because we have jobs, jobs, jobs to make,” he admits. “We need something like COVID where a company stops, comes to a halt and you say, now we need to reinvent ourselves.”

He’s watching AI video generation closely — the same way he once watched game engines from his living room. But the lesson from his own story is that pivots don’t happen during busy periods. They happen when everything stops and you’re forced to look at the tools you’ve been ignoring.

FAQ

How did Prismax pivot from pre-rendered video to real-time 3D?

COVID shut down all live events, eliminating Prismax’s revenue. The co-founders, both gamers, decided to rebuild their production workflow around Unreal Engine — the same game technology they were playing with during lockdown. Their first project was a virtual Tomorrowland festival with 8 stages and 100 DJs.

What is the difference between pre-rendered and real-time 3D production?

Pre-rendered production calculates every frame offline — light bounces, reflections, shadows — which can take hours per frame. Real-time rendering uses game engines to calculate everything instantly at 25-30 frames per second. Changes that used to require 48-hour render cycles now happen in the moment.

Why did Prismax choose Unreal Engine for live event production?

The co-founders were already familiar with Unreal Engine as gamers. When COVID forced them to rethink their workflow, they proposed building Tomorrowland’s virtual festival in the engine. The real-time rendering capabilities — instant feedback, live manipulation, no render queues — proved so superior that they never returned to traditional tools.

What kind of events does Prismax produce visuals for?

Prismax creates real-time 3D visuals for major live events including Tomorrowland (400,000 attendees), the Las Vegas Sphere (16K×16K resolution), Formula One, Dota 2 championships, and concerts for artists like Alicia Keys. They also build immersive LED room installations for private clients.

How does real-time rendering change the creative process for live events?

Directors and operators can adjust visuals instantly during rehearsals and performances — no waiting for renders. Physical stage elements like pyrotechnics trigger synchronized visual effects on screen in real time. This creates a feedback loop between the physical and virtual that pre-rendered video can’t achieve.

What are immersive LED room installations?

Prismax builds rooms where every wall is an LED screen displaying a real-time 3D world — Alpine landscapes, cityscapes, forests. The environments respond to real-world data: weather systems match actual conditions in the location being simulated. LED panels are spaced at 0.7mm pixel pitch for extreme clarity at close range.

Can startups replicate the COVID-era pivot strategy deliberately?

The uncomfortable truth is that the pivot worked because external circumstances forced it. Corthout admits that with a full production schedule, his team now struggles to find time to experiment with new technologies like AI video. Forced reinvention during downtime created capabilities that years of planned R&D might not have.

What did Prismax lose by pivoting away from traditional production tools?

Very little, according to Corthout. The real-time workflow is strictly faster — instant feedback instead of 48-hour render cycles. The main investment was learning curve: an eight-person team had to retool their entire skill set around game engine technology within weeks, under the pressure of delivering a virtual festival.

How long did it take Prismax to become competitive in real-time 3D production?

The initial virtual Tomorrowland project happened within months of the pivot. But the competitive moat deepened over years — building proprietary systems for data synchronization, scaling to 16K resolution for the Sphere, and developing immersive room products. Early entry during COVID gave them a head start that later competitors couldn’t easily close.