PLAYA VISTA, CA -Digital Domain and UFC have joined forces to create what UFC President, Dana White, called, The most expensive commercial we've ever shot, but without a doubt, the most bad-ass commercial we've ever done for the upcoming UFC featherweight title fight between champion Jose Aldo and Irish sensation Conor McGregor fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Opening with a nearly deserted Las Vegas, the two fighters walk the streets gathering growing throngs of fans for a showdown starting at the crossroads of MGM Grand and Las Vegas Blvd and transforming into a packed arena. The piece premiered during UFC 187 and has now been viewed over 1 million times on YouTube and has gone viral throughout the online MMA world.
Working from a concept created by Chris Kartzmark, UFC Senior Vice President of Production, Digital Domain Creative Director and Mothership in-house Director, Neil Huxley wanted to do a piece deserving of the nature of this fight. I love working with the UFC, said Huxley We've worked with them before and they knew we could pull of the size and scope they wanted. This piece needed to feel like a trailer to a blockbuster movie. They wanted the piece to feel epic, like an event the gods would be watching.
Huxley and his team looked for inspiration from the gritty cinematic language of action films from the late 80s and early 90s. Taking color temperature and shadow balance inspiration from films like Fight Club and Die Hard. I wanted to shoot anamorphic to give this a cinematic look, said Huxley. Shooting into lights to give nice anamorphic flares and over cranking the footage to pump up the atmosphere. From the very start of the piece, with ominous thunderclouds over the strip, the piece sets the stage for an epic showdown.
Presenting perhaps the biggest challenge were the always packed streets of Las Vegas itself. It's extremely difficult to take one of the busiest intersections in the world and make it seem completely deserted, said Dan Akers, Visual Effects Supervisor. Las Vegas is never empty, even at 4 am. The always-packed intersection of MGM Grand and Las Vegas Blvd needed to appear at first to be deserted and end eventually filled with the two fighters and thousands of fans.
The production was faced with a grueling 16-hour shoot to get all the live-action shots and plates necessary for the visual effects. The thing is, we had to recreate a full CG Vegas strip that transitioned to a full CG stadium with 18,000 people, said Akers. And this all had to be seamless and photo-real.
The visual effects team went to work stripping the Vegas streets of cars and tourist and replacing them with extras originally shot on blue screen. About 75 extras were carefully and creatively turned into thousand for the final two shots. The streets were skillfully redone, the ubiquitous jumbo screens that line the strip were filled with promos for the fight, the night skies were replaced and fronts of casinos re-created.
Adding to the challenges, Aldo and McGregor were not available to shoot at the same time, so for the key moments at the end of the piece they were both shot separately on bluescreen. For the live-action shoot they needed to carefully coordinate the two fighters' separate parts so they could be cut together seamlessly. The final transition has the two fighters standing in the street toe to toe. The camera spins around them and we are transported into a packed UFC arena. With the exception of the two fighters, the entire arena and all 18,000 fans, were entirely CG.
Having the ability to do both the live action and VFX in-house proved at great asset to the production. Working with Dan Akers in-house enabled us to really dial this piece in and get the level of finish that feature films have months for, said Huxley. Dan and his team pulled this off in just four weeks.
Decades of feature film experience and innovation were invaluable to the final success of the piece. We didn't look at this as just a commercial, said Akers. We treated this just as we would treat any of our award winning feature films.
You can view the final product on UFC's official YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4xewIFm8go
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
PLAYA VISTA, CA -Digital Domain and UFC have joined forces to create what UFC President, Dana White, called, The most expensive commercial we've ever shot, but without a doubt, the most bad-ass commercial we've ever done for the upcoming UFC featherweight title fight between champion Jose Aldo and Irish sensation Conor McGregor fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. 
