UFC president/CEO Dana White is pulling out all the stops to put on an unforgettable show this weekend at Riyadh Season Noche UFC at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and has brought in some of entertainment’s big guns in order to make it happen.
White’s vision for Saturday night’s event on Mexican Independence Day weekend is to deliver a “love letter to Mexico” and celebrate the legendary spirit of Mexican fighters down the years as part of a UFC event packed with exciting fights, and spectacular pageantry in the unique setting of the state-of-the-art Sphere.
It’s a monumental undertaking and, as he told John Morgan, the level of production required for this event is unlike anything combat sports have ever seen before.
“Every Saturday night, we put on an in-house live event, and we put on a television event that goes out to the world, two different types of shows with two different groups of people that run each one,” White explained, as reported by RG.org.
“That night (at the Sphere), we’ll have two more trucks, so you will have the greatest director in Hollywood right now that does all the award shows – his name is Glenn Weiss. He’ll be shooting both of those live and trying to make the people at home feel the experience at the Sphere. So all this stuff has to come together and be seamless. On September 14, it’s going to be amazing.”
The challenges that have presented themselves to White have included things MMA promoters would usually take for granted, like how to light the cage. In any other arena, the Octagon would be lit from above by a lighting rig suspended from the arena ceiling.
However, with the nature of the Sphere’s interior, where the ceiling and interior walls all form a massive screen, and with the crowd all situated in high-rake seating high above the Octagon, a standard lighting rig was a non-starter, and White revealed just hoe much of ahead-scratcher that one problem was as the UFC’s production team, led by Craig Borsari, set about addressing how to make it work.
“The level of difficulty and the complication of this event is at a whole other level,” said White.
“Figuring out the lighting was the first thing. That took four months. It took four months to figure out just the lighting. Then it took months to assemble a team to help us pull this off.
“I’ll give you an example. Let’s say we do the ‘show open’ (the opening video package that is played at the start of the event) on a regular Saturday night. That thing renders … it takes a couple hours.
“It takes 12 days to render anything that changes (for the Sphere). We had to build a render farm inside the Sphere. We literally built our own render farm in there. The level of how complex this thing is, if I even laid a quarter of it out, people wouldn’t even understand how hard and challenging this thing really was, and is.”
It all meant that White’s top-drawer production team needed more manpower and expertise to help them cover all the bases for this special one-of-one event, and White said the UFC has managed to draft in some of the very best in the industry to be a part of the production.
“We went after the A-Team of talent to be involved in this, and every one of them said, ‘You’re nuts! And we’re in!'” he said.
“One of the guys that’s working on the show (Weiss) has won 14 Emmys, you know? So to have a challenge like this at this point in their career, they love it.
“I’m looking at the synergy between my team and all these people that are all major people in Hollywood, (it) has been fantastic. So it’s exciting. We’re excited for this. It’s gonna be fun.”
UFC 306 at Riyadh Season Noche UFC takes place Saturday night at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
