Gravity Media Prepares for a Flight of Fancy With the PDC World Darts Championship 2025 for Sky Sports

Gravity Media prepares for a flight of fancy with the PDC World Darts Championship 2025-26 for Sky Sports By Heather McLean

Monday, December 22, 2025 - 12:13

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The Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) World Darts Championship 2025-26 is now underway at Ally Pally, with host broadcaster Sky Sports and the team from its technical services provider, Gravity Media

The Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) World Darts Championship 2025-26 is now underway at Ally Pally, with host broadcaster Sky Sports and the team from its technical services provider, Gravity Media, getting into the groove for a long competition that runs over the winter holiday period.

Gravity Media is using its expanding Nova 112A truck for the main Sky Sports production coverage of The Worlds', and the Nova 112B truck for onsite edits and media management. The event began on 11 December and runs through to 3 January.

On how the excitement and atmosphere of The Worlds is being captured, Jon Giles, Gravity Media staff unit manager and client manager for Sky Sports, goes into detail on the cameras being used.

The primary cameras on this are Sony HDC-3500's HD live broadcast and studio cameras. We also have a Sony HDC-5500 for a Hi Mo (6x) replay angle as well. We then have an additional eight Bi Mo (2x) and Super Slo Mo (3x) cameras. Those replay angles are used to great effect to tell the story of what's happening in each round of darts or leg of darts.

They're coupled with robotic cameras supplied by MRMC for Sky Sports.

These are for cameras 2 and 3 [HDC-P50 camera paired with a Canon CJ 45 lens], which provide the key close-up coverage of the board. As you watch the coverage, you'll see that there are two or three main cameras that have constant, very close-up coverage of the board, and the director will then cut between them according to whatever shot they think they're going for, for which they use the spotter to help guide where they're going to go, he adds.

In darts, the director cuts the show without a vision mixer, using information shared by the spotter' - a person in the truck who calculates where the next dart is going to go on the board - which is unlike any other sport.

Game of teamwork

Giles says that this is a true game of teamwork for the crew working on The Worlds. On the director, he notes: They can't work with the spotter on their own; the camera ops do need to know the game and understand and pre-empt things themselves. They've got a blend of large zoom lenses and box lenses. There's a particular shot that provides, and this is a very challenging one to get in some environments a shot right from the back of the room. It's camera 14, and it's an over-the-shoulder shot.

What they're trying to achieve is the dart flying through the air and hitting the board, and the camera operator needs to try and follow focus on the dart through the air. Now that's probably one of the most challenging shots that they have. And then that's also attached to a three-times super slow-mo angle. So if the stars align and everything works perfectly, you can get an amazing shot of seeing the dart fly through the air and hit the board on the target in super slo-mo. When that comes off, it's really cool.

There are a lot of elements to the room at Ally Pally that add to the difficulty level of getting a shot like that, however. So we can throw all the toys at it, but you end up with it being an environment where it can be a bit challenging to get a really, really good quality picture, he continues. But actually working with the Sony family of cameras, we're able to get consistent pictures. We work very hard with the vision supervisors, making sure that we're just keeping the colours and the way the board looks consistent, the best we can.

At the PDC World Darts Championship 2025-26, the coverage includes a significant number of bi, tri and six times motion cameras which are used to great effect during the coverage

Specialist cameras

The coverage includes a significant number of Bi, Tri and six times motions cameras which are used to great effect during the coverage: Bi Mo cameras are used on some non-board cameras. For example, the jimmy jib is used extensively, not really much to cover closeup play, it's more for reaction shots and they use it for presentation. But sometimes they want to be able to take a slowed down replay from that camera angle when the operator's just in the right place at the right time so they can then get the benefit of having a two times slow mo from that angle without having to have paid for the full three times or four times or six times slo mo camera.

Gravity Media is in its third year of doing the player walkouts with a Fancam cinematic camera, which Giles says is still doing well.

He comments on the Fancam: It's something that actually we're quite proud of. We use a Sony A7S, and we've worked really hard with the engineering team to get that looking as good as it ever could in terms of matching the other high-end Sony cameras. The real advantage [of the A7S] is it's compact, it's small, it's not getting in the peoples' faces. It's not like a Steadicam rig that takes up a lot of space.

Gravity Media is also pushing the cinematic trend using a Sony FX9 camera to provide the bokeh that can bring an added sense of drama to coverage. He says: A new thing we're including this year is that we've always had two handheld RF cameras, one being the A7S, and the other one was a normal handheld large format camera. Having tested with Sky at events earlier in the year we've added a Sony FX9 this year because we really want to get the real shallow depth of field look of that, which is something you achieve with the A7S well.

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