Boxer Rebellion: Premier Boxing Champions, Part One

Photo by Suzanne Teresa.

 

With the rise in popularity, both in practice and in viewership, of mixed martial arts the last few years, boxing has seen a sharp decline, but the sweet science is seeking a major comeback, demonstrated in no small part by the new Premier Boxing Champions (PBC), which debuted at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in March.

Haymon Boxing created PBC in order to breathe new life into the sport, and the premiere marked the first time in 30 years that NBC has aired a boxing match. Production designer Bruce Rodgers of Tribe, Inc., who says this was “definitely a different and challenging project,” was first contacted by Michael Marto, president of Executive Visions Inc., to help Haymon Boxing reimagine the look of professional boxing, and to bring the sport back to primetime television. “Along with the talented lighting designer John Featherstone of Lightswitch, technical producer Mario Educate of OSA, rigger Bill Spoon, designer/builder Erik Eastland of All Access Staging & Productions, executive producer Michael Marto, and my design team at Tribe inc., our core group went about finding a tourable design that would provide a signature look to the new world of boxing,” says Rodgers.

Rodgers adds that “the stars aligned” to bring the team together with key players that included Matt Celli, David Gibson, Anthony Bailey, and others at NBC Sports, as well as “friends at CBS Sports, ESPN, SpikeTV, and Bounce TV” to finesse the design into a system that would work visually and technically in various size venues. “And to top it all off, Michael brought in Hans Zimmer to compose all the music for the new TV series venture, which checked a major bucket list item of mine.” 

Photo by Suzanne Teresa.

 

Featherstone, also brought in by Marto, says that his lighting team, including co-lighting designers Chris Medvitz and Warwick Burton, was tasked with presenting “a truly unique and ground-up rethink of the boxing experience,” adding that he was particularly excited to do this project, having grown up in the Midlands and North of England in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, when boxing was an integral part of his community. “Football might be the ‘English religion,’ but it was a sport we watched, not a sport we could aspire to. You needed a bunch of friends and a lot of space to play soccer. All you needed for boxing was a 12' square, an opponent, and two pairs of gloves, and the gloves were optional! You could ask anyone on the street who the World Heavyweight Champion was, and they would instantly know. I wonder if that would be the case today. I suggest perhaps not, and we wanted to change that. We wanted to remove the tarnish and grime from the ‘Sport of Kings’ and give boxing back to the fans in an all new presentation and design.”

Rodgers’ vision included the massive main stage, called “The Wall of Thunder,” as well as the immense scoreboard, dubbed “The Death Star,” comprising several rings, including the camera truss ring, the scoreboard and lighting grid ring, the soffit ring with the mother grid, and finally, “The Ring of Honor.” All Access Staging & Productions was responsible for all the staging structures and scenic features for the event, including The Wall of Thunder, The Death Star, custom scenic truss, mother grid, lighting truss, custom PA hangers, video support, the NBC broadcast desk, and all the structural and scenic elements that went into the athlete warm-up rooms. These components also featured a significant amount of LED integration.

Photo by Suzanne Teresa.

 

All of this, Rodgers says, was a daunting task: “Respect the basics of boxing, a 5,000 year-old sport, and the audience viewing experience, build a look that is modern, cool, and dramatic that supports the essence of the sport, and the most challenging part, create a design that matches the emotion that one feels when listening to Hans Zimmer’s music,” the designer says.

Rodgers tackled the task in a number of ways, his main goal being to help define the visual and very vertical scale. “I thought it would be important to create a modern gladiator-sized arena look that could travel to different cities, giving the viewer a sense of the same place in each city,” he says. “Imagine walking into your familiar town venue to find it transformed into an epic environment that you recognize from the television event you’ve been following. Having a TV set travel and generating this feeling is making the live event more fun and satisfying to the live and TV viewer.” 

Featherstone notes that the vertical space issue was a welcome challenge, as well as an opportunity to rethink the way combat sports are lit. “There is a ton of vertical space in an arena, and often, that vertical dimension has been unexplored in boxing events,” he says. “We wanted to use the ring as the anchor, of course, but fill the visual frame with exciting elements that quite simply transform regular sports arenas into cathedrals for boxing. This also means ‘no bad shots’ for the TV directors, with visual interest and excitement in every frame.”

Photo by Suzanne Teresa.

 

Wrapped around the Ring of Honor is what Featherstone calls a “hub-and-spoke” array of lighting trusses for both ring and audience lighting positions. “Working from the center point defined by Bruce, we used the lighting to extend the immersive reach of the production all the way into the corners of the arena,” he adds, noting that the lighting design detracts from more traditional one-off sporting events, where the norm has been using arrays of conventionals—also adding LEDs in recent years—on a four-sided grid around the ring. “We took a step back, rethought the approach, and after much discussion with the TV networks and many photometric studies, decided on a circular truss loaded with arc source moving lights,” Featherstone continues.

The main fixture in the lighting rig is the Harman Martin Professional MAC Viper AirFX—28 of them, and Featherstone calls them “remarkable and crazy flat and bright”—covering the ring. “Rather than carving the ring into sections and trying to ‘feather’ the light, we treat the ring as what it is: one complete combat zone,” says Featherstone. “Light falls evenly from positions every 12º or so around the ring. There is consistent lighting from every angle. The TV crews love it, the 360 camera guys need it, and the boxers and their trainers have responded very positively to it.” Another 75 MAC Viper AirFX luminaires are used for audience light and stage backlight, while 30 Martin Professional MAC Viper Performance units are for stage key light.

Check out Part Two!