Every year, the Weatherspoon Art Museum puts on a Masquerade event for Halloween. Previously, they had all been about the same, no discernible theme, branding, or gimmick. We turned all that around in 2015, themeing everything we could to our retro cartoon aesthetic! The museum is two stories, with a large open lobby on the first floor, and the museum on the second floor. Windows from the second floor overlook the ground floor from a domed ceiling.
In 2015, I was asked by the head of the Weatherspoon Art Museum's Masquerade board to create the visuals and interior decoration. We decided to focus on electro-swing sounds and retro cartoon visuals, and created some amazing interior spaces, swag, and branding!
Taking the interior themeing to the next level, we created mask ("masq") templates for guests to create their own retro cartoon character mask, bringing them further into the world we were creating. These paper cut-outs were available by the photobooth, where participants could use pens and markers to decorate their masq!
As a huge fan of animation, and the original moving images, recreating this style for the event was a breeze. We created a few characters to represent our different ticket types, and a spookier, more abstract poster, conceptualized by the event's director, Tristin Miller.
For the social media ads, we decided to go with simpler graphics and a dark-rainbow color scheme, contrasting stark black graphics.
The pièces de résistance for party-goers was the animated montage that I curated and, using two Epson projectors, projected onto the domed ceiling of the lobby. There, guests on the dance-floor below could marvel above, and those on the second floor could enjoy the visuals as they perused the museum's collections.
