UFC chief content officer and executive producer Craig Borsari has assured us that the Sphere won’t get in the way of fighters at UFC 306.
Headlined by a bantamweight title defense between Sean O’Malley and Merab Dvalishvili, UFC 306 takes place at the Sphere in Las Vegas on Saturday. The unique event, also known as “Noche UFC Riyadh Season,” marks UFC Promotions’ first and only venture at the Sphere.
The Sphere boasts a 240-foot-tall, 16K x 16K resolution interior display made from 64,000 LED tiles covering 160,000 sq ft. The event, which also marks Mexican Independence Day celebrations, will feature films screening across the media plane, raising concerns that combatants may be distracted by the unprecedented scale of the event.
But Borsari revealed that the promotion already has plans in place to ensure there are no distractions for the fighters. Borsari said that while films will be playing across the media plane, there will be “quiet” periods between bouts. The promotion wants to create a “cool” experience for those in attendance and those watching at home, but there will be no distractions during the bouts.
UFC 306: O’Malley vs. Dvalishvili airs Saturday at 10pm ET on ESPN+. Order now!
“We have six 90-second films that take up the entire media plane. When the films are over, we transition into what we call a world,” Borsari told Shakair Majli. “There are different states for the world. There’s an active state where things are going on in the world. When the fighters come out, it gets a little more active, there’s more activity. When the fighters come out, there are different lighting effects, different animations. When the fight is going on, we call it the quietest state. It’s all about the fighting at that point, and we want to provide a really cool environment for the people in the venue and the viewers watching on the broadcast. But we don’t want to be the creative lead at that moment. Whenever there are two fighters in the Octagon, it revolves around them. So we’ve tweaked these world states to make them really quiet and really focus on the fighting action.”
This raises further concerns that spectators in the back seats will be watching from a distance as the fights will not be broadcast across the entire media plane, but UFC has found a way to get around this issue with image augmentation: IMAG screens large enough to show the fights inside the Sphere without distorting the image.
“We’re going to use the acronym IMAG, which stands for Image Magnification,” Borsari says. “So what happens is that your normal broadcast feed goes into these IMAG cutouts in the environment. It’s not like the media plane is completely taken over. That would cause all kinds of problems. If the fighters were 80 feet tall, it would create distortion and it would be a very unnatural way to experience the fight. We found some pretty large IMAG cutouts that fit within the world, and that allow the viewer to get a really cool high-resolution image of the athletes in combat action, and also allow us to continue the storytelling because it fits within this environment that we’ve built.”
