Wembley Stadium will host an undisputed heavyweight boxing title fight for the first time this Saturday (19 July) when Daniel Dubois faces off with Oleksandr Usyk in their much-anticipated re-match.
As the host broadcaster of the event, DAZN is bringing out the big guns for the TV coverage.
At this Queensbury Promotions event, from Frank Warren, the production will be supported by DAZN’s OB supplier for Queensberry Promotions, Gravity Media, with Chris Glanville, DAZN’s head of boxing, USA and the rest of the world, directing the action.
SVG Europe caught up with Glanville to find out what to expect on the night and learn how the broadcaster is upscaling for what is set to be a truly epic event.
Bringing in the A-team
DAZN does weekly live boxing productions in the UK and the US, as it works with Matchroom Boxing, Golden Boy Promotions, Queensbury Promotions, and Most Valuable Promotions (MVP), founded by boxer Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian in 2021.
“We consistently do boxing, but every now and again you get the big one, and this is the big one. You have to upscale,” Glanville tells SVG Europe, speaking from LA after an Open Workout broadcast for The Ring magazine.
“We do a standard boxing production, but when doing something like Wembley and with the likes of Usyk and Dubois – who are obviously major names in boxing – you have to upscale. So it is a matter of throwing, as they say, the kitchen sink at it and turning what is a big event into a massive event, and we have to do that in the production.
“So what do we do?” he continues. “We add more talent. We bring in our A-team, our pay-per-view talent, and we bring in additional specialist cameras. So spidercams, helicopters, things that will elevate a broadcast beyond a standard production to emphasise what is a huge global boxing event.”
On a standard boxing match, Glanville says DAZN uses anything between eight and 12 cameras, “which is enough to show off boxing in a smaller venue”. For this weekend’s fight, that figure goes up to 21.
For a regular upscale boxing production DAZN would use drones or stock footage from drones to show the location, whether that be a stadium, theatre or town hall. However for Usyk vs Dubios, drones are out and a helicopter is in. The helicopter will be used early on in the night to capture the walkouts for the main event, as well as the fireworks that will light up the stadium.
Glanville explains: “For this fight, you upscale. We are using a helicopter for this one because we want to show off Wembley and we want to show off the show that is not just within Wembley, not just within the bowl, but actually outside of that. What that means is fireworks and pyros and whatnot.”
Glanville adds: “We’ve never used a helicopter on boxing before.”
Ringwalk spectacle
A lot more cameras are being employed to capture everything for the broadcast, from the changing rooms to the ringwalk, to the location, and then the actual fight.
“We’ll have cameras in every changing room for the main event, so we can record and play back live shots from each of the fighters,” he says. “Now we wouldn’t normally do that [with two cameras]. We do that maybe sometimes with one camera, but we have cameras in each of the locker rooms, so we don’t miss a moment of them arriving, wrapping, warming up and leaving the changing rooms.”
DAZN is working closely with a production company that is responsible for putting on the walkout show, which includes a choreographer to ensure the walkouts, music and lights all pull together to heighten the suspense prior to the fight.
“It’s just capturing really that spectacle, which is the walkout,” says Glanville.
He adds that the walkout part of the evening has a lot of weight on it. “The amount of calls we’ve been on about graphics and movement and music. The walkout itself for the main event, the route to the ring is not direct. There’s a whole walkway being planned, which takes them around the stadium and then through the crowd into the arena. The walkout is as much a part of the boxing as the boxing itself.”
On capturing the ringwalk, Glanville says: “We are using more cameras to cover the boxing, and to cover the walkouts. Walkouts obviously has become a massive part of boxing; it’s not just about the fighting, it’s about how they get to that ring and you have that as it’s a show in itself. So we’ve got to show that off and to do that we have DSLR cameras – Batcam Hold – which is a specialist camera with a specialist lens that blows out the background. You open the aperture, it knocks the background out, and makes things look very, very pretty.”
As well as the DSLR camera for the walkouts, DAZN is employing a spidercam, which is being set up to run the length of the stadium. He says: “That gives us a 360 degree view of stadium and everything in it. We then are using a helicopter. We’re using jibs. Now you would normally get jibs, but that would be your big camera, but that is complimented by everything around it.”
Onsite presence
DAZN is working onsite for the fight. In the studio at Wembley will be Lennox Lewis, who will be part of the commentary team with Joseph Parker, led by Kate Abdo and Ade Oladipo.
Comments Glanville: “We’ve got a studio there, which is quite big for us. Plus we’ve got a reporter position with Ade Oladipo on an LED floor. Anything that we do from a graphics perspective, we can use our wirecam to look down on the floor and we put graphics in that floor.
“We also have augmented reality (AR) graphics, and not a lot of people use that on boxing, so you see huge 3D graphics in the stadium on a spidercam, so again, that is an added extra for this level of fight. Because it’s exclusive on DAZN, everything is pretty much onsite.
“The only thing downstream of us then is our additional languages. We’ll be adding Spanish language for our Hispanic community globally, and also we’ll be adding Arabic to this event as well.”
Offshoot Operations is DAZN’s graphics operations supplier, while Girraphic is DAZN’s AR graphics partner.
Directing the action
Glanville will be the director on the night. He notes: “I’ve directed sport for the past 20 years and I’ll be fortunate to be showing this one to the world on Saturday 19 July.”
On his strategy and plan for bringing those pictures to fans, Glanville says: “Not missing anything! My thing as a director, my one thing as a director, is always geography; it’s not just showing a tight shot of Uysk and Dubios because they’re the main event, but it’s showing where they are, where we are, what the stadium looks like, what the geography is from the locker rooms via the stadium to the ring.
“So I’m all about geography, I’m all about prettiness and making things look as beautiful as we can,” Glanville says. “If we’ve got pyros, I want a camera next to it to show those off, and then I want to show off where they are in the stadium. So it’s all about that connection, so everybody can see where everything is. For people at home who are not going to be there won’t have the eyes [on the spectacle] that everybody has [inside the stadium] so it’s about showing them the geography between everything and making sure that we’ve got everything covered.”
Glanville is excited about what DAZN will be getting on pay-per-view screens across the world on Saturday night. “I’m really excited. This will be the first time that Usyk would have fought at Wembley, and the first time a Unified Heavyweight World Champion will be at Wembley. So because of that, it brings an additional excitement and edge to this fight and the exclusivity of this fight for DAZN. We’re all very, very excited to be a part of this historic event.”
Watch Dubios versus Usyk on Saturday 19 July live on DAZN pay-per-view. Ringwalks will take place at 9.45pm BST. The DAZN broadcast will begin at 5:30pm with the first undercard fight starting at 5.35pm
