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PSL Screens Dominate London’s Biggest Fight Club
Transforming London’s new O2 Arena into the modern equivalent of the Colosseum, the Ultimate Fighting Championship staged its largest-ever event in the UK. No weapons in sight, the fighters barefoot and equipped just with light gloves, these twenty-first century gladiators battled it out in front of a sell-out crowd of 18,000 people, most of them avid fans of the UFC Series broadcast on cable TV from the USA.
Now in its 14th year of operation, this American-run professional mixed martial arts tournament series follows a rich history and tradition of competitive sporting combat which dates back to the first Olympic Games in Greece. Despite its reputation as ‘human cock-fighting’, the competition is between trained athletes skilled in the various disciplines of all martial arts, including karate, jiu-jitsu, boxing, kickboxing, grappling, wrestling, sumo and other combat sports.
Big fighters in the UFC’s proprietary Octagon ring, but, with such a huge crowd filling seats all the way to the top rows, it was hard to see the action in any detail. Although the sightlines in the O2 Arena are excellent, especially in this in-the-round configuration, to ensure that not one punch or grapple is missed, visual technology specialists PSL have provided six massive projection screens, three of which are arranged at each end of the arena.
“The screens are vital to the Championship,” explains PSL’s Pod Bluman, “so important that the UFC is willing to sacrifice a large number of seats in order to accommodate the large projection surfaces. Using our new Christie S+20K projectors, we were able to give them an exceptional standard of clarity and detail on very large screen formats.”
Four 24’ x 18’ screens were positioned in the ‘corners’ of the auditorium, while at either end, PSL mounted two 30’ x 22.5’ screens, built specially for this UFC event. The 12 Christie projectors were flown in double stacks.
The projectionits were Fergus Noble, Phil Pieridis and Ian Haywood and the screen technicians were Tim Stefiuk and Lee Bartlett.
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