Children of the Weeds was by far the most involved project I’ve had the pleasure of creating and working on. I came up with the idea of doing a service industry themed haunted house with my brand Triple Sink Mafia and pitched it to my business partners. We reached out to Bartist Consulting to collaborate with them on this event, chose our venue, Fort Greene, and secured sponsorship with Maverick Beverage Company. Then we spent a few months planning what would turn out to be a two night Halloween Party with a walkthrough haunted house, cocktail competition, live DJ, specialty cocktail menu, and other attractions.
The name “Children of the Weeds” is a play on the Stephen King novel of a similar name, while referencing the commonly used phrase of “in the weeds” or “weeded.” When used in the service industry, it refers to an extremely busy service where you feel you’re constantly falling behind, and can’t catch a break.
Poster Design & Process
I was originally going to illustrate the poster, but it wasn’t working for me so I scrapped that idea and chose to use photoshop to create a collage reminiscent of classic 80s airbrushed movie posters used for movies like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and more recently, Stranger Things. With this, I was able to portray our event as if it were an actual movie coming to theaters, and whoever looked at it could start to create their own narrative based on the characters, objects, and settings within the visual. I created a simple logo with a slasher style horror typeface, and then chose Benguiat ITC for the majority of the other text to portray a classic element used in the design of horror book covers and movie posters (e.g. Stephen King novel covers or Stranger Things title).
Ultimately, I think that the direction I chose created a more captivating visual identity for this event that attracted people within our target demographic.
Creative Process
Initial Concept Sketch
Second Concept Sketch
Finalized Concept that I wasn’t satisfied with
Reimagined Concept that led to final design.
Social Media & Ad Campaigns
We chose to advertise with a combination of social media campaigns, sponsored ads on social platforms, and some guerrilla marketing by way of wheat pasted posters around the city of Denver. I created a lot of different reels for our social media campaign including a horror movie montage and multiple digital flyers with animations and sounds.
The boosted ads saw a pretty good ROI, we reached thousands of people in our demographic, gained some followers, and sold some tickets through the ad clicks.
What really worked the most for us was the consistent posting of new, creative, and eye catching digital animated flyers combined with word of mouth from the long time supporters of our brand. Maintaining consistence in posting to social media definitely kept the momentum going and held our event’s place in people’s minds.
Menu Design
One of the social media posts I created for our campaigns used an image of a VHS tape with the poster design on it to reiterate my concept of portraying this event as if it were a movie. I continued in that direction and thought it would be a great idea to design the custom cocktail menu that Courtney and Tim had created for the event in a way that made it appear to be the front and back of a VHS cassette sleeve. I applied some of the same techniques I used to get that 80s airbrushed look on the original poster for the images on the back of the menu. I chose to add a few layers of different textures like plastic and worn paper, and then I completed the design with some realistic looking stickers on the front and back to really sell the idea that it’s an old, worn, previously owned VHS sleeve. Two of the cocktails called for little signs as garnishes, so I designed them using some of the same typefaces and textures used on the menu in order to keep
everything harmonious.
T-Shirt Design
We knew early on that we wanted our companies to have a collaborative T-shirt, as we both sell merch on our own. Tim came up with this great idea to represent both of our brands; theirs representing bartenders and front of house, and ours representing dishwashers, cooks, and back of house. He proposed we create a design that was a riff on the “Jack of all trades, master of none” saying, with the image being a jack face card, and one of the characters is a bartender, with the mirroring character being a chef. We chose to go with an image of a skeleton character for both for a few reasons: skeletons are gender neutral, we were going to release this shirt on halloween, and frankly, they’re badass and people love to wear shirts with skulls on them.
I illustrated the design in Adobe Fresco, and chose to use imagery like a chain border and chain link fence background to add texture to the image, while reflecting the aesthetic we’ve already created with Triple Sink Mafia.
Instagram Carousel & Promo Reel
Haunted House
We were able to secure a $2,000 budget from Maverick for this event. Some of which went to supplies for cocktail batching, the cocktail competition, advertising, and the DJ, but most of it allowed us to construct a pretty awesome, service industry themed, walkthrough haunted house. We also had some help with borrowed halloween decorations, props, and kitchen equipment from our friends at Honor Farm “Haunted Spirit House.”
I was the lead on the haunted house’s conceptualization & design, but I had a team of people help me with the execution. It started off walking through the nightmare ticket printer hallway, leading to an evil chef who was butchering humans and he’d drop his arm when someone walked through for a jump-scare. Next turn had a walk-in refrigerator stocked with kegs, gross things on the metro shelves, and complete with an animatronic “wailing waitress.” Finally you exit out of the back of the “kitchen” into an alley where a couple skeleton line cooks are taking their break, shooting dice, and a horror movie montage I had my friend Chris create, being projected on one of the alley walls.
I created a few props beforehand, one of which was a dummy with a moveable arm out of supplies from The Home Depot. I used a bucket as the torso, attached brackets to mount to a PA speaker stand that I had, and built an armature out of nuts, bolts, washers, PVC pipe, and hot glue. I also created a pile of guts out of some foam core and expanding foam, which I spray panted to give it that wet, bloody effect.
The Reward
After months of planning, days of prepping, and a half a day of constructing, we finally opened the doors of Fort Greene for our event. It was such a great experience for everyone involved in the production, as well as all of our guests. Some of our guests even said that it was the best service industry event they’d ever been to.
Between presale tickets, presale merch, door sales, and event merch sales, Triple Sink Mafia and Bartist Consulting netted a little over $4,000. Bar sales for Monday and Tuesday night were about $1,300 and $2,300, which blew their normal Monday and Tuesday sales out of the water.
Being the lead on so many aspects of this project really taught me a lot and it was a great experience that I would love to do again. The team I worked with showed me how capable we all are when we share a unique vision and are able to fulfill the roles that we’re assigned. I had so much support on this, and I truly couldn’t have done it without the help I received from my friends, business partners, and collaborators.
