Big Game 17
Bringing the energy of a live show to Twickenham Stadium.
put on the most epic show yet.
ELEV8 brought us in to handle the lighting and video across the event – the DJ set, the player runouts, and the halftime show. The kind of brief we're built for: take the energy of live performance and bring it to sport.
the beginning
Big Game is Harlequins' Christmas showpiece. For its seventeenth edition, on Saturday 20 December 2025, it took over the Allianz Stadium at Twickenham with a double-header – Harlequins against Bristol Bears, the women's match followed by the men's.
Two teams, two matches, one pitch, and a full programme of entertainment running through the day in front of a packed Twickenham. Everything we built had to serve all of it.
A stadium is an unforgiving canvas. It's vast, it's fixed, and it's shared – every element has to work around the sport, the broadcast, the environment, and the clock. That constraint shaped everything that followed.
the idea
ELEV8 came to us with an initial concept, and we helped turn that creative vision into reality.
We tested designs and fixtures until we had a design that could light all of the in-bowl entertainment scheduled across the day, work within tight changeover windows, and stay as discreet as possible in between. It also had to hold up outdoors – this was December, in the open air, so weather wasn't an afterthought, it was a real design consideration.
use the whole stadium.
The design had one job above all: be everywhere it needed to be, when it needed to be there, and nowhere when it didn't.
So we treated that unforgiving canvas as a single one, with lights around the roof, through the players' entrance, on the dollies that ring the pitch, alongside custom video carts out on the field. We also incorporated the stadium's own new lighting – the pitch lights and the roof uplights – so everything read as one considered look.
one visual language, consistent the whole way round the pitch.
Crafting a visual language for stadium boards comes with its own challenge – the screens wrap the entire pitch, are over 80,000 pixels wide, but with very little height in comparison.
Rather than build content at full scale, we were given a pixel map of every screen and its size, then created our content at a smaller scale designed to tile cleanly around the perimeter once we were on site.
The visual art had to do three things – work with the screen size, hit the brief, and fit with the match environment. The answer was a reactive wave that moved with the energy of the crowd, building through the set from the smallest ripple to a screen full of motion.
It was then tiled around the stadium, so it mirrored seamlessly and no harsh transitions were visible from one screen to the next.
The on-field panels carried the same soundwave through; being square, the visuals were reworked to fit, again keeping every transition clean.
Ultimately, the visual language had to be consistent and work the whole way round the pitch.
programming
Programming a show like this means pulling lighting, visuals, and lasers together and shaping them into something that feels like one thing, not three.
We programmed lighting and lasers across the entire day – player warm-ups, branded activations, player walk-outs, and the in-bowl DJ sets building up to Groove Armada's showpiece – all cued to four timecoded tracks.
Fixture choice was key, and the environment played into these decisions. Ayrton Cobras, with their laser source, gave us the long-throw beam looks that could cut through a stadium that size. Chauvet Colorstrike Ms handled the hard-hitting strobe moments. And a mix of Astera AX2, Acme Pixelline and other LED covered the tunnel lighting and the other activations.
production
With design, programming and production under one roof, we could build something imaginative and completely functional for a live sporting environment.
All of it we built ourselves – twelve rolling risers wheeled around three sides of the pitch, each on its own levelling system, each carrying five Ayrton Cobras, four Chauvet Colorstrike Ms, a hazer and a fan. Into the players' entrance we rigged Acme Pixelline, run horizontally and vertically down the tunnel. A simpler moving-light rig went onto the main stage, rolled out onto the pitch alongside everything else.
Overhead, another twelve Cobras and four Ayrton iForte LTX went into the roof – hung on moving-light brackets we fabricated in-house and roped up individually, one at a time, over 50 metres by rope ascender. The iFortes earned their place twice over: team gobos thrown down onto the pitch, and general key light. We ran everything back to a single control position above the players' entrance, tied together through the stadium's own network and power, then fine-tuned each fixture until the whole rig looked considered and intentional.
We also supplied six 2m x 2m 4mm LED screens that rolled on and off the pitch on custom built frames, riding on pitch-approved pneumatic tyres so nothing ever damaged the surface.
Everything was prepped and tested in our warehouse first – every light, every screen, checked before it went onto the truck to the stadium.
The biggest challenge was time. We had just 20 minutes between the two games, and the whole rig had to be clear of the pitch in under four minutes before the men's kicked off. Ten of our technical crew worked alongside more than sixty local crew to roll it all on at the end of the women's match and back out of the way in time.
effortless for the organisers. unforgettable for the fans.
This stadium-scale production is proof of how well our instinct for making a moment land in front of a crowd carries into live sport.
made with zeal.