UAE Pro League Awards 2025–26

Lighting design, technical drawings and timecode for the UAE Pro League’s 2025–26 season awards, staged in the ballroom of the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi on 10 August 2026. No.1 Events & Productions produced and supplied, with Hassan Abdulhamid directing.

A ballroom built into a stadium. The creative idea was to put the room inside the game: tribunes constructed around a playing field made entirely of LED floor, running seamlessly into the main LED screen. It was a live broadcast with UAE Pro League chairman H.E. Abdulla Naser Al Jneibi, senior officials, players and club representatives in the room — so every state had to satisfy cameras from all angles and a VIP audience at the same time.

The venue set the rules. Rigging points carried only 250kg each and were not where you would want them, so getting fixtures into the right positions took some creative rigging. The ceiling was about 6m. The room fought back in other ways too: white ceilings, a great deal of LED, and a laser performance with dancers — all of which demanded precise intensity control and hard-edged spill management. That is why the plot went to profiles.

24 Ayrton Rivale Profiles, 46 Ayrton Kyalami. The Rivale was the key light, 360 degrees, for every camera and for the room. Its zoom ratio made a 6m ceiling a non-issue, its CRI let the same fixtures serve as broadcast key, and its speed let them work as automated followspots — the two MCs were tracked by Lumatrack, keeping them lit for broadcast wherever they moved while the LED floor content stayed clean underneath, with no spill around them.

The Kyalami went to three positions: floor level behind the performers, around the audience, and on top of the screen. At floor level they gave depth and separated performers from the top light without ever blocking the LED content; around the audience there was no room for anything bulky. Small, neat fixtures were essential everywhere they went.

What earned its place. The framing shutters, above all — cutting spill off the LED surfaces and the laser performance area was the whole job. Then the zoom ratio that made the low ceiling workable, the low weight that made the rig possible inside the 250kg point limits, the CRI that allowed one fixture type to serve as broadcast key, and the animation wheel and gobos for texture in haze.

The two states we would keep. The laser performance with dancers — Rivale gobo and animation-wheel texture in the haze alongside the lasers, every beam framed so nothing spilled onto the LED. And the MC moments: a presenter crossing the LED pitch, keyed by a tracked Rivale, floor content vivid underneath, no spill around them.