Getting Creative With MooTV (and Brad Paisley)

Scott Scovill teaches old songs new tricks. 

Owner of MooTV, Moo Creative and The Steel Mill, Scovill and his team provide award-winning video production for tours including video systems, LED technology and projection mapping. 

Based in Nashville since 1992, Moo TV pioneered creative content and production services. Recent clients include Garth Brooks, Jason Aldean, Kane Brown, Maren Morris, Chris Young, Dierks Bentley, Chris Stapleton and Brad Paisley. 

Paisley was recently in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the outdoor Live Oak Bank Pavilion with his “Truck Still Works World Tour,” produced by Live Nation, where the temperature was sweltering and the boot and flip-flop crowd was on their feet. 

A gifted guitar player and natural entertainer, Paisley debuted in 1999 with the record Who Needs Pictures, which included his first of 25 No. 1 singles, “He Didn’t Have to Be.” With a catalog that deep, filling a two-hour show with hits is easy. Keeping it fresh is up to Scovill. 

“The real trick here is working with an artist that’s been around for 20 years,” offers Scovill. “So, you do something for ‘Mud on the Tires,’ and then you do something again for ‘Mud on the Tires,’ and then you do something again for ‘Mud on the Tires.’ When you’re 20 years in and doing something for ‘Mud on the Tires’ it’s like, ‘What do we do that people haven’t seen yet?’ That’s always the challenge.”

Trucks in mud. Check.

A mud fight. Check.

Big tires throwing mud on a video screen. Check.

And then there’s the current variation: cool-looking trucks – covered in mud – at a drive-in theater with Paisley on the silver screen. 

“It looked cool and it was a cool new environment for that song,” says Scovill of the No. 1 hit released in 2003. “It’s one of the simpler ones, but it is a really good example because it’s been a hit for so long.”

Shawn Hancock runs Moo Creative. The company’s in-house designers, compositors and editors work hand-in-hand with artists, touring pros and engineers to create content that complements the creative vision and integrates with all of the MooTV systems. 

Scovill occasionally goes outside the company to “friendly competitors” for collaborations including Lüz Studio, who worked on Paisley’s show opener in Wilmington.  

The pace was fast, the hits plentiful and the vibe upbeat including the self-deprecating, humorous take on fame, “Celebrity,” which included a life-size, mascot character version of Paisley. Originally released in 2003, the song has stayed fresh by using popular culture and the news-of-the-day to poke fun at the foibles of the famous.

“He does all kinds of crazy things,” says Scovill. “Whatever anybody does, he then does it. So, when Michael Jackson holds a baby over a balcony, he did it. And when someone gets arrested for smoking a joint in the park, the next day we’ve got the headline in it.”

Moo Creative used an arcade set animated by Scott Meador that morphed over the course of five songs kicking off with “Ticks” as a video game where the blood suckers attack and then moving into an arcade photo booth – which turns into the “Kiss Cam” – for “She’s Everything.” The attention then shifts to old tube TVs on the wall for “Last Time For Everything” and then to a relic, pay-per-minute computer.

“I don’t know if you remember those – but they existed for a minute,” explains Scovill. “You could stick quarters in and get on the internet for a minute. We did that for the song ‘Online.’ …We created an environment that made this stuff new and fresh.”

Scovill points to footage of Paisley swimming with sharks for the song “Water” in 2009 as an example. “What a fun piece of content,” says Scovill. “How are you gonna top that? We aren’t going to top shark diving: Brad with a guitar and sharks swimming around him. I don’t know how you beat that?”

They did. The team projected the old footage on the surface of water along with  footage of Paisley’s live show, which is possible due to the projection mapping technology where projectionists can bring any surface to life. The coastal crowd was captivated. 

The Moo Creative team didn’t stop there. There is a 60-foot bass that makes an appearance on the downbeat of “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song)” and a water-skiing squirrel named Twiggy careening around a lake in “River Bank.”

Since 1999, Paisley has logged 860 shows with a gross of $361,285,193 and 8,714,493 tickets sold through May 31, as reported to Pollstar box office. The current leg of “Truck Still Works World Tour” ended Aug. 3 and picks up again in November with nine dates in Canada. The Wilmington date was his first stop in the market since 2014. Paisley is managed by Kendal Marcy of KrisCar management. 

Paisley has been on tour with special guest Walker Hayes and a variety of opening acts including Alexandra Kay in Wilmington. For “I’m Still A Guy,” Hayes joined Paisley in his virtual “man cave” – a total AI environment with man stuff on the TV and a singing deer head on the wall. 

“We just kind of ‘South Park’ animated,” explains Scovill, who has received nine Pollstar Awards for video production company of the year. “We just took the mouth and cut part of it away, Photoshop and animated it up and down.”

Bells and whistles, hooks and sinkers aside, the most impressive piece of creative content was the mashup of “Mr. Policeman” (with an on-stage appearance by Wilmington officers), “You’re In the Jailhouse Now” and the “Smokey and the Bandit” inspired “Eastbound and Down” in stop motion animation.  

As an homage, instead of Burt Reynolds running interference so that a tractor trailer can get illegal beer to Georgia, the adaptation featured Brad Paisley in a Trans Am running point so that his semis can make it to his show.

“In one song we did more work than we do on most artists in one year,” explains Scovill, who grew up making model trains and spent 500 hours on the project with stop motion animator Katie Groshong and stop motion photographer Jeff Wedding, partners in filmmaking company GypsyRoot.  

The meticulously detailed miniature landscape – complete with aliens kidnapping a cow – filled four rooms in Scovill’s house. A parking lot set, which had 30 vehicles with working headlights, took over his upstairs closet.

“I’m probably $40,000 into 1/43 scale cars, bridges, buildings, all that,” he says. “We haven’t even added it up and it doesn’t really matter. Pay me what you want. I’m having fun…I’m never trying to make money with creative. I’m trying to make artists happy with creative. If we do it right, we can make money renting equipment and people and making everything work.”