Earl's Holiday Ransom Scavenger Hunt

Project Description

Horrifying Holidays! I wrote and designed this humorous scavenger hunt as a Holiday outing for my team. Even though this was a holiday scavenger hunt, I wanted it to have a horror edge because myself and the team I was creating this for love horror. I created a world where all the holiday cheer this time of year comes from somewhere sinister.

In this story, the pressure of feeling holiday joy has created a disease called Christmas rabies and it is being spread by the patient zero, Earl the Squirrel. This usually cheery mascot has taken a darker turn and he is holding the antidote hostage until you find everything on his ransom list. The scavenger hunt goes through the New York area of Universal Studios Florida and inside the Holiday Tribute store. Each ransom item is a hidden easter egg or reference you have to find.

Once you’ve found everything on the ransom note, the story takes a heartwarming turn (it is Christmas after all). Earl tells you that you don’t have to fear Christmas rabies. Holiday joy can be whatever you want it to be and it shouldn’t have any pressure behind it.

This story took a very simple scavenger hunt and gave it a fun, sarcastic tone to bring some smiles to my team and thank them for all their hard work this year. I designed the ransom note to feel chaotic with handwritten, uneven text, drastic photocopy effects and even distributed them to the team as crumpled wads of paper. I did all this to sell the world I was creating in the story.

I had a great time making this and look forward to creating more next year.

Software Used:

Adobe Illustrator  //  Adobe Photoshop

Date:

December 2024