Paramount Tower Hits 20 Stories: Nashville Drone Co Captures the Rise
Nashville's skyline is in the middle of one of the most significant transformations in the city's history, and one building is about to change everything. Paramount, the 60 story residential tower rising at 1010 Church Street, has officially reached its 20 story milestone. When complete, it will stand 750 feet tall, making it the tallest building in Nashville and the entire state of Tennessee.
To document this moment, Giarratana Development, the developer behind more downtown Nashville residential high rises than any other name in the city, turned to Nashville Drone Co. Over the years, Nashville Drone Co has built a reputation among developers, contractors, and property owners across Middle Tennessee for capturing large scale construction projects with precision, creativity, and an unmistakable sense of energy. The result is a body of footage that does more than record progress. It tells the story of a city reaching new heights, one floor at a time.
A Skyscraper 30 Years in the Making
Tony Giarratana has spent more than three decades shaping the Nashville skyline. His portfolio includes landmark buildings like 505, Prime, and Alcove, each one pushing the boundaries of what downtown Nashville living could look like. Paramount represents the culmination of that vision. Designed by the Chicago based architecture firm Goettsch Partners, the tower broke ground in September 2025 after a complex financing process that Giarratana himself described as grueling. The project will eventually include 360 apartments and 140 condominiums spread across 60 floors, along with 517 parking spaces. Once finished, Paramount will rise 137 feet above the current tallest building in the city, permanently altering the skyline that Nashville residents have known for generations. Now, with the first 20 floors complete, the city is getting its first real glimpse of what that future will look like. And Nashville Drone Co has been there to capture it.
Why Aerial Footage Matters for a Project Like This
Construction milestones are easy to describe in numbers. Sixty stories. Seven hundred fifty feet. Three hundred sixty apartments. But numbers alone do not capture what it actually feels like to watch a building of this scale rise out of the ground in the heart of downtown. That is where drone footage becomes essential.
Nashville Drone Co owner Keith Stancil approached the Paramount project the way he approaches every job: not as a routine flyover, but as an opportunity to tell a visual story. Stancil has built his reputation on more than two decades of professional entertainment marketing experience, and that background shows in the way he frames a shot. Rather than simply hovering above the site and recording, he choreographs each flight to build a sense of scale, motion, and anticipation.
The footage opens with sweeping high altitude shots that place Paramount within the context of the entire Nashville skyline, showing exactly how the tower already dominates its surroundings at only a third of its final height. From there, the camera drops down into close, detailed passes along the exposed steel and concrete floors, giving viewers a rare, up close look at the construction process itself. Cranes swing overhead. Workers move across open floor plates hundreds of feet in the air. The building feels alive, not static. This mix of wide establishing shots and intimate close ups is intentional. It is a technique borrowed from cinematic storytelling, where filmmakers use varying points of view to control pacing and emotion. Applied to construction photography, it transforms what could be a simple progress update into something people actually want to watch and share.
Capturing the Energy of a Downtown Build
Filming a high rise under construction in the middle of a dense urban environment is nothing like flying over an open field or a rural property. Downtown Nashville presents a unique set of challenges that require real experience to navigate safely and effectively. Church Street sits in one of the busiest corridors in the city, surrounded by other high rises, heavy pedestrian traffic, active construction equipment, and constantly shifting wind patterns created by the surrounding buildings. Flying a drone in this kind of environment requires more than just piloting skill. It requires a deep understanding of airspace regulations, situational awareness, and a safety first mindset that never lets up, even for a single flight. Nashville Drone Co has built its reputation on exactly that kind of discipline. Every flight around the Paramount site follows strict safety protocols, including careful pre flight site assessments, coordination with the construction team on the ground, and constant monitoring of nearby air traffic and structures. Operating under FAA Part 107 certification, the team plans each flight path in advance to avoid active crane zones, worker locations, and neighboring buildings, all while still finding the angles that make the footage compelling. This combination of technical skill and cautious planning is part of what makes Nashville Drone Co one of the safer options for developers working on complex, high visibility projects in tight urban spaces. A single mistake around an active construction site is not something any developer can afford, and that reality shapes every decision the team makes before the drone ever leaves the ground.
Bringing Viewers Closer to the Build
One of the things that sets this project apart is how close the footage brings viewers to the actual construction. Rather than relying solely on distant skyline shots, Nashville Drone Co pushes in toward the exposed floors, capturing the raw texture of rebar, formwork, and concrete pours that most people never get to see up close. These details matter. They remind viewers that behind every gleaming finished skyscraper is months of labor, engineering, and precision happening hundreds of feet above the street. At the same time, the team balances those close range shots with wider perspectives that show Paramount's relationship to the rest of downtown. Viewers can see how the tower already interacts with neighboring buildings like Alcove and Prime, both of which Giarratana also developed along the same Church Street corridor. Watching the three towers together from above tells a bigger story about how one developer has methodically reshaped an entire section of the city over the course of three decades. This creative approach, mixing macro detail with sweeping context, gives the footage a documentary quality. It is not just marketing content. It is a visual record of a defining moment in Nashville's growth.
The Technical Side of Filming a Rising Skyscraper
Every ten or fifteen floors a building climbs, the filming approach has to change with it. Early in construction, when a site is still just a foundation and a few floors of steel, drone operators can fly relatively close and low, capturing the site from nearly every angle without much concern for surrounding structures. Once a tower starts climbing past 15 or 20 stories, the entire calculation shifts. At its current height, Paramount already competes for airspace with several of the buildings around it, including its own siblings, Alcove and Prime, along with the Pinnacle tower across the street and the pair of Amazon buildings butting up against the west side.
Flying safely at this stage means constantly recalculating altitude, distance, and flight paths to avoid interference while still getting shots that feel dynamic rather than distant. Wind behaves differently at 250 feet than it does at ground level, funneling and gusting unpredictably between buildings in a way that can catch an inexperienced pilot off guard. Keith Stancil and the Nashville Drone Co team account for these variables before a single rotor ever spins. Flight plans are mapped out in advance, taking into account the position of the sun for lighting, the location of active cranes and workers, and the flow of surrounding air traffic. It is a level of preparation that most people watching the final footage never think about, but it is exactly what separates a smooth, cinematic sequence from a shaky, rushed one.
As Paramount continues to rise, these challenges will only grow. Filming the top of a 750 foot tower requires an entirely different level of precision than filming the top of a 20 story one, and Nashville Drone Co is already planning for how those future flights will look.
What Comes Next
With 20 floors complete, Paramount still has 40 more to go before it claims the title of Tennessee's tallest building. Substantial completion is expected by May 2028, meaning the tower will continue climbing for the next couple of years. Each new milestone, whether it is topping out, glass installation, or the eventual grand opening, presents another opportunity to document the project from above. Nashville Drone Co plans to continue capturing Paramount's progress as construction advances, building a visual timeline that will eventually show the tower's full transformation from an empty lot on Church Street to the tallest structure in the state. For a project this ambitious, a single flyover is not enough. It takes an ongoing commitment to documentation, paired with the technical skill to keep improving the footage as the building grows taller and the shots become more complex.
A Partnership Built on Trust
Giarratana Development did not choose Nashville Drone Co by accident. High rise construction projects of this scale require a partner who understands both the creative side of storytelling and the operational realities of flying safely in a dense downtown environment. Keith Stancil and his team have spent years building that kind of trust with developers, contractors, and property owners across Middle Tennessee, and the Paramount project is a clear example of what that experience looks like in practice.
As Paramount continues its climb toward 750 feet, Nashville Drone Co will be there documenting every stage, from the ground breaking early days to the moment it officially becomes the tallest building in Tennessee.
For a city that keeps reaching higher, it takes a team that knows how to capture that ambition from above.
Nashville Drone Co provides professional aerial photography and video services for construction projects, real estate, and commercial clients throughout Middle Tennessee. Contact Nashville Drone Co to get you project scheduled. info@nashvilledrone.co