Planning a barbie-themed event
Since early February I’ve been working on an event called The Alphies for Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship at IU! The Alphies is an annual formal event inspired by The Oscars, but geared towards college students. Think photo booths, dinner, silly awards, musical/fun performances, surprises and pranks, and a dance party to end the night. I was in charge of planning all the creative elements of the night, which involved me doing everything from photography to graphic design, video production, script writing, arranging music, leading a band, designing light sets, putting together live performances… I literally used every skill I have on this thing! 😅
For those who don’t know, from 2016 - 2023 I worked full time for Chi Alpha! So I’ve been very involved with The Alphies over the past 8 years, and even though I’m no longer working with Chi Alpha they still decided to hire me to plan this year’s event.
Here’s a short promo video I made using footage from past events. They showed this video at their weekly worship services and used it to promote the event on social media.
This year The Alphies had a Barbie theme (well, due to a three-way tie it was technically a Barbie Masquerade under a Starry Night 😂). One of the things I did was make posters for each of the Chi Alpha staff in the spirit of the character posters from the Barbie Movie. I shot and edited each of these photos and re-created the posters from scratch in photoshop! This was one of the later things I did so I didn’t have quite as much time as I would have liked to really dial in the logo (hardest part to recreate for me 😅) but I’m very happy with how they turned out! We shared these online and also printed them out to display at the event.
The photoshoot for this was a blast, in typical Jo fashion I gave the staff very little info about what we were doing.. a few knew but most had no clue. I told them we wanted to capture their personality in a photo and they could be as silly as they want.. we shot all the guys at one time and they all started grabbing random props from around the church which ended up in some really great and nonsensical photos.
Most of my time over the past three months was spent working on live music. I assembled a band to start learning music for the program of the night and the dance party, and in addition to leading the rehearsals I also played drums, programmed all the synth patches/sounds, and arranged music by combining parts from various scores I found online. I wanted to do Dance the Night as our opening number, and recruited my wife Lindsay to choreograph a dance for the Chi Alpha staff inspired by the one in the movie. The biggest performance of the night was of course, I’m Just Ken. We set up a storyline leading into the event and throughout the first half of Luke (the number 2) feeling overlooked and unappreciated by Derek (the Chi Alpha Director). We called our version I’m Just Luke and tweaked some of the lyrics to fit our storyline, and I brought all the guy small group leaders in on some simple choreography to bring our rendition to life.
At the end of the night we played Dance the Night, Shut Up and Dance, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and Levitating before turning it over to Spotify for the rest of the dance party. Because I can’t do anything half way, I also spent several hours of the week designing light presets for each of the songs with about 30 LED lights that I hooked together to try and make this night as colorful and immersive as possible.
I’ll hopefully be sharing videos of some of the songs soon! :)
If all of that wasn’t enough.. I also helped several students make campaign videos to try to win awards (ranging from Best Roommates, to Most Cooked, Rookie of the Year, Best Fall Breakaway Performance, and more), I edited an 8-minute highlight video of the entire school year featuring footage from events, services, student uploaded content, baptism testimonies, etc, and did a lot of work planning the award categories, scripts, order of the night, etc. If I shared everything on this blog post it would be far too long. 😅 But below are a few more fun videos I did! As you’ll see, all of these were quick, fun videos for college students, not big time productions. :)