European Volleyball Championship · Arena 8888

EuroVolley 2015 - where it started with the federation: 130 m² in Sofia and Varna.

“Thanks to KVANT Bulgaria and their dedication and professionalism, the European Championship became much more colourful and effective. Thank you.”

Evgeni Ivanov - Pushkata · video testimonial, EuroVolley 2015

The European Volleyball Championship at Arena 8888 in Sofia, for the Bulgarian Volleyball Federation. Screens, lighting and content for every point of view in the hall - for the audience, for television, for the sponsors - from the first training session to the last match. We have worked with the federation since 2015; since then, every international volleyball event in Bulgaria has gone through us.

We designed the layout, delivered and installed everything, and had a crew in the hall every day for the whole period: two lighting operators, two multimedia operators and two technicians. In the mornings they ran the lights and screens for training, during the day they rehearsed with the directors, and in the evenings they worked until the last minute of the match.

The screens. Ten, 239 m²: a 70 m² P4.808 perimeter in five screens · 64 m² P2.604 · two of 30 m² P2.604 · a 15 m² P2.604 arch · a 30 m² P1.9 curved screen. Installation took four to five days, three weeks before the first match, because the hall’s schedule had three dates that could not move: training sessions and a friendly against Serbia; Salparov’s farewell match, broadcast on bTV; and basketball in the hall the day after the final. The basketball floor is bigger than the volleyball court, so it went down first, with the volleyball surface on top: the hall changes over in one night, and we take nothing down.

The lighting. Arena 8888 is lit with gas-discharge lamps: switch them off and you wait 15-20 minutes for them to cool before they come back on. Before every match there is a light show, and the hall has to be dark for it - yet the match has to start seconds after the show. With the venue’s own lighting, that cannot be done. So we brought in our own 44 Philips ArenaVision LED gen3.5 - 22 on each of the hall’s two long sides, 17 metres up - which switch off and on instantly, with broadcast-quality light. The lighting design was prepared together with Philips Bulgaria and Romania: the official photometric calculation guarantees an average of 2920 lx on the court, against the FIVB requirement of over 2000 lx. On top of that came the effects lighting for the show: over 200 moving heads up in the rig and on the floor, six Kvant 20 W lasers and six cold-spark machines - all programmed by our lighting operators.

The content. Every match is a new programme: an intro for every player, graphics for every country, the pre-match show, the sponsors between sets. The video is prepared between matches and played live by our multimedia operators in Resolume Arena - on ten screens at once. The project reached 48 layers.