Nashville International Airport (BNA) in Tennessee has installed a 140ft digital art display by creative studio Gentilhomme in the lobby of the expanded international arrivals terminal.
In the security zone, passengers will be greeted by two adjacent displays portraying cultural staples belonging to the city and its surrounding region. Spanning two panoramic screens each 70ft wide at 24K combined resolution, hours of video capsules have been curated to pay homage to Nashville’s legacy. With the mantra ‘good times await your return’, the team produced hours of original video content including advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI) and live-action filmmaking captured in over 20 locations within Nashville and surrounding Tennessee areas.
Passengers traveling through Nashville will see more than a dozen vignettes experienced as massive digital art postcards. One of the pieces, Art of Making, was filmed at two local music institutions, Nashville Guitar Company and Delgado Guitars. In this piece, a guitar is created from start to finish, including the selection and working of wood, all the way to the finished product. Hall of Fame showcases vinyl records as a symbol of Nashville’s status as the Music City. Distillation exhibits the city’s whiskey distillation process with a mechanical wall full of pipes, gears and various machinery pieces that are animated to depict the various stages, from grain preparation all the way to aging.
City of Lights is a colorful scene from the city’s cultural center, Broadway Street, in action. To produce this segment, Gentilhomme closed the iconic nightlife strip for two days, converting it into a live action film set. Nashville by Night takes passengers on an aerial journey through the city’s downtown skyline, filmed in 8K slow motion using drone and time-lapse cinematography, while nature-focused vignettes pay homage to Tennessee’s natural characteristics, from green forests, waterfalls and cypress trees to the Great Smoky Mountains and freshwater streams. The piece Sports in Nashville is a game time capsule celebrating Nashville’s sports culture, with featured teams including the Tennessee Titans, Nashville Soccer Club, Nashville Sounds and the Predators.
Gentilhomme Studio’s public multimedia entertainment piece is intended to portray the city’s character through reference to its nature, sports and nightlife. The project was conceptualized and produced in-house by Gentilhomme with Burns Engineering, Inc., Helsel Phelps, Corgan, Fentress Architects, International Display Systems, Inc. Smart Monkeys, Pixera and Omnivex.
Thibaut Duverneix, founder and executive creative director at Gentilhomme, said, “Gentilhomme shapes experiences that provide a sense of identity to a place by creating and producing beacons of entertainment. For Nashville International Airport, we used a large multimedia canvas to bring Nashville’s vibrant energy to life through a series of playful vignettes. Whether it’s the city’s iconic whiskey distillation or guitar-making process, the peaceful and whimsical sketches mesmerize passengers of all demographics in unexpected ways, transforming traditional signage in public spaces into a conduit for immersive storytelling.”