Nashville Star

"Nashville Star" opens with a fast-paced crowd fly-over that mimics the size of an audience for the Olympics, complete with fireworks befitting such a gigantic event.

This dramatic opening sequence flies the viewer up onto the stage in front of an exciting but unidentifiable performer, finally pulling back and culminating with the show's logo that resembles a giant rodeo-style belt buckle, emblazoned with the words, "Nashville Star"! This highly energetic opening for a summer reality television show comes to us courtesy of Big Machine Design with the aid of CINEMA 4D.

"Nashville Star" is the grassroots talent search to find America's next great country music star. Much like "American Idol", "Nashville Star" contestants sing their hearts out in front of a live audience and are judged by industry veterans and voted on (or off) by fans. When the votes are tallied, contestants are scored for each performance with the lowest-scoring contestant going home until the final "sing-off" leaves just one winner. This summer, the winner received a recording contract, a new Chevy pickup truck and an opportunity to sing at the Olympics in Beijing - so the stakes couldn't be higher.

With "Nashville Star", the USA-based NBC television network chose to play in the big leagues, the longest-running cable TV reality show (previously aired on cable TV's USA Network for five seasons). The show's producers, 495 Productions, decided the move warranted an epic-sized opening that featured both live action and 3D. Big Machine set about making this happen in a mere two weeks, with a team of three designers.

"We've used CINEMA 4D since 2003 so we naturally turned to CINEMA 4D to pre-visualize the crowd and stage placement. We also created the final camera movement and stage in CINEMA 4D. The camera information was exported to After Effects where we composited the crowd of thousands", says Ken Carlson, creative director/co-founder of Big Machine Design.

Big Machine's pipeline for "Nashville Star" included Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects with the CINEMA 4D R10.5 Studio Bundle, and MoGraph, working on the Macintosh. "CINEMA 4D is a critical part of our production pipeline. It integrates seamlessly with After Effects, which is a key selling point for our studio", remarks Ken.

Big Machine: Motion Graphics Design and Illustration