Tampa digital video studio firm expands nationally with Nashville studio

Tampa’s Vu Technologies has officially gone national.

The digital video studio company, which owns and operates a massive soundstage with a wraparound LED wall in Tampa, has expanded with a second studio in Nashville. It’s the company’s first facility outside Florida.

The 16,000-square-foot studio, featuring a 123-foot-long by 20-foot-high screen known as a volume, is one of several the company — which last year spun off from Emmy-winning Tampa video production company Diamond View Studios — plans to open in 2022, with studios also in the works for Las Vegas and other cities. There, as in Tampa, the studio is called Vu.

“Nashville has become an incredible destination for media and entertainment and we believe it is the perfect location to expand our network,” Tim Moore, the co-founder and CEO of Diamond View and Vu Technologies, said in a statement.

Vu’s technology is similar to that used in films and TV shows like The Mandalorian, where producers splash high-definition digital landscapes behind actors to simulate photorealistic alien worlds.

The technology allows for “unprecedented time and money savings,” Moore said, as “producers and directors no longer need to move the entire cast and crew in one studio or location for production. They enjoy the game-changing savings, enhanced creativity and more controlled safety from the convenience of their choice of city.”

Vu’s Tampa studio opened in the former University Mall in 2020, and has since been utilized by companies like Apple, Disney, Mercedes-Benz and the WWE, and was featured on the Today show. The first production in Vu’s Nashville studio, a corporate video for Tractor Supply Co., was filmed last week.

The national expansion comes a month after Vu Technologies announced it had received a $10 million seed investment led by Minnesota’s ADX Labs.

At the time, ADX founder Steven Renner said the studio represented “the pinnacle of virtual production technology and integration.

“We are thrilled to have invested in what will soon become the world’s largest network of game-changing, almost holodeck-like film, TV and corporate video studios,” Renner said in a statement.