BWT Alpine Formula One Team Designer, Sean Bull provides a detailed breakdown of how he created the 2025 Bahrain GP Race Poster, ahead of racing in Sakhir this week.

What were the initial steps you took when designing the Bahrain GP Race Poster?

With this year’s Bahrain Poster, my first design of the year, I aimed for a minimal and dramatic tonal scene. I utilised the strong red tones of the Bahraini flag, transitioning the background into a harsh darkness to represent the night race. This effect was achieved by casting shadows of the Bahraini flag’s spikes across the scene. I wanted this poster to be bold and direct, drawing attention to the centerpiece of the car without too many distractions. At the same time, I aimed to relate it to the location of the race without being too cliché, looking toward a new direction.

An in-depth process explanation of how you designed this specific graphic?

A lot of time was spent on building the scene, getting all the assets in for the pit stop gantry and getting it as close as we could to the version we have in reality in the pitlane, with a lot of reference images gathered and studied from the pitlane over the years, with close attention paid to the wiring, pit stop lights, wheel guns and all aspects that go into our design, so this was both a fun and rewarding challenge to create this scene.

With all my cad and CGI work I look to get the shot I want first in the viewport and build the scene around that, so its deciding what camera setting and focal lengths to use to best fill the scene and work with all the various sizes and outputs we have to create (making a design work for both portrait A2 posters and wide landscape social media headers proves to be a challenge year after year) from this starting point it was a switch between using a long 80mm Lense to start with to get it into the scene space, bit after a few render tests and revisions I felt it was compressing the image too much and giving it a toy like feel, so a switch to a more cinematic 35mm Lense gave me a better and more natural looking result

Once happy with the camera setup and the scene build, the next step is lighting, I always try to chase an emotional setup first with a strong direct hero light to cast thew scene and give it some impact, a danger is always over exposing the scene to devoid it of any drama, so this is created with a low sun light to fill the scene and cast the all-important shadow I wanted of the Bahraini flag spikes, after I have this I look at tweaking and hiding elements of the lighting, to help bring the scene to live and focus on the areas I want to showcase, with the car being the key area, I looked at adding some strip lights hidden from view and set to only illuminate the car, trying a few clean lights gave a nice lift to the blue paint in what was to start with a pretty dark scene, and then switching this up to be red and more directional gave some nice highlights across the engine cover and synchronised with the scene that bit better than white lighting and retained the tonal red look.

After I’m happy with all this I try to adjust the scenes post production with a mix of in render settings playing with the bloom, glare and tone mapping, experiment with various luts, temperatures and contrast curves to achieve the look I want, after this and when the scene is rendered out I do some further adjustments in camera Raw/Photoshop to mainly just fine tune and get some more control of the shot that isn’t available in the render engine (we use redshift and c4d for this year’s posters), this instance it was about colour balancing and grading the car back to live and making sure the BWT pink was still showcased as with such a red scene it was getting lost a bit in the global illumination of the render.

From this stage after statics are outputted, we look to animate the scene so it can be used in the garage screens during the race week, and the fun aspect with this pitstop scene was to have the car drive in, stop and drive out but with the animated loop swapping between each driver.