Star Wars Scavenger Hunt

Role: Producer, writer, creative direction
Creative team: Annie Ashley (graphic design), Vencenza Surprise (graphic design, fabrication), Richard Whitefall (engineer), David Walsen (video VFX), Michael McQuade (video), Ron Amador (fabrication)

In October Microsoft does an annual campaign to raise money for charity. This year my team partnered up with another team to produce a giant scavenger hunt (the second annual!) and we wanted to make it bigger and better than ever before. Our theme? Star Wars.

We met as a team, with me driving production and PMing the project to keep it moving forward. I, along with the rest of the team, also played a role in the creation of the artifacts.

First, we identified seven locations we could hide the pieces of the lightsaber along with the next clue. We chose locations like the library on campus, the volleyball court, inside a mason jar of home-made Blue Milk, and buried in the forest. Someone from the team donated one of the Lightsabers from Disneyland so we hid each piece of the Lightsaber with the next clue. The winner would put the Lightsaber together as they go, ending the scavenger hunt with an epic Sith duel to win the complete prize basket.

The whole experience was built for Star Wars fans by Star Wars fans. We had endless hours of fun compiling clues in alien languages like Aurebesh, pulling quotes from films, and writing educational pages from “books” like “The History of Kashyyyk and the Wookies that Lived There” (which we completely wrote from scratch and branded.)

There were pre-recorded phone numbers the winner would call, programmed by Richard, our engineer, a video delivering a message from Leia (me in cosplay), and business cards that led to “Death Star IT” (a.k.a. our internal tech support team).

The Clues