Dana White on whether The Sphere's huge LED screen will distract fighters at UFC 306 during fights
09/09/2024 09:34
As MMA fans around the world enter their final countdown to UFC 306, aka UFC Noche, at The Sphere in Las Vegas, Dana White opens up on some of the more technical aspects of putting on a live sports event in the jaw-dropping new arena.
Whilst the visual spectacle of UFC 306 is expected to be mind-blowing, there is a concern that the enormous 160,000-square-foot LED screen that wraps around the inside of the arena will distract athletes during their fights.
Even Dana White 'doesn't know' whether the LED screen will impact the action
Part of the UFC 306, also known as UFC Noche, extravaganza includes a feature film that will be broken up into different 'chapters' and plastered across the enormous screen of The Sphere in between fights.
According to UFC Executive Craig Borsari, "Those films then transition into what we're calling these 'worlds', which is like these environments that take up the entire LED screen, that then the fights sit within."
Yet it's these 'worlds' that the promotion will display during the fights themselves that are cause for concern; with UFC featherweight Brian Ortega having already said that he will 'for sure' be distracted by the lighting and environments that the screen renders when he faces Diego Lopes.
Despite the insane production and countless rehearsals going into the show, even Dana White was forced to admit that had 'didn't know' whether the mid-fight environments could impact the action itself.
"We don't know [if it'll distract fighters], we don't know until late Saturday night," he told veteran MMA reporter John Morgan via Grind City Media.
"I won't do outdoor arenas because of wind, bugs or rain but this is still a controlled environment where on September 14th, sports and entertainment are truly coming together at the same time.
"Does it work? Is it great? Is it awesome? Does it suck? We don't know and we won't know until it's over but we're going to try it."
White noted that he's taken full control of the show's planning as he ponders every little detail of the production: "We're going to rehearse the s*** out of this thing, I still know every detail but what I don't know is if this works.
"We're basically doing movies, there will be a movie that night and between chapters of the movie, there will be fights and you'll see our thought process and how we laid it out, how we figured this work – but at the end of the night, we'll know whether it does or doesn't."
With UFC 306 only a few days away, the team will be conducting constant rehearsals in the hope of ironing out any little mistakes that could crop up, with the UFC President noting that "The level of difficulty and the complication of this event is on a whole other level."
Dana White expands on the production-side of UFC 306 at The Sphere
Given the scale of the UFC 306 show compared to your regular UFC events, it's no surprise that the promotion has been forced to go above and beyond both in terms of recruitment and the technology needed to host such a spectacle.
"Figuring out the lighting was the first thing, that took four months," said White: "It took four months just to figure out the lighting and then it took months to assemble a team to help us pull this off."
"I'll give you another example; say we do a show open on a regular Saturday night, that thing renders in a couple of hours – it takes 12 days to render anything that changes, we had to build a 'render farm' inside the Sphere, literally built our own render farm in there."
The upcoming PPV will also have its own show director and will need twice as many production trucks as usual.
White then claimed that even if he gave fans a tease of just 'one quarter' of the show, people still wouldn't be able to understand how complex the production-side of UFC 306 will be.
"How complex this thing is, if I even laid a quarter of it out, people wouldn't even understand how hard and how challenging this thing really was.
"We are all dialed in, ready to go and now it's about rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal – as many times as we can rehearse this [as possible]."
UFC 306 goes down September 14 live from The Sphere in Las Vegas.
