Frank Gatto & Associates lighting director Jason Eible shared some of the ways that the lighting team stoked excitement for the UFC 229 “Khabib vs. McGregor” bout on Oct. 6, 2018. “We’ll do blackout cues when they run video sequences. The lighting will work with video and audio, so we bring everything to black, which gets people excited. Then we’ll bring up some lighting along with music and video for the fighter entering. The main event fighter walk-ins are a bit more dramatic. They’ll start walking backstage, whereas the rest of the night, the other fighters are standing at the bottom of the arena ready to go. For the entrance, there’s a music cue, and we like to see when people grab their cellphones and start crowding for access; it’s something that we try to capture in the moment. We also have four followspots for each show to highlight the fighter’s entrance.”
—Wilson Burke, from “Lighting for the Camera,” PLSN, Nov. 2018, page 54.
