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Homecoming 2022
America's Greatest Homecoming
The biggest project I have ever worked on, and my favorite, was the house decoration of Zeta Tau Alpha and Sigma Phi Epsilon for Oklahoma State University's 2022 Homecoming Celebration. I served on the Director team as Head Creative Director and, while the project itself was daunting and like nothing I had ever worked on before, the experience strengthened my creative eye, my Photoshop skills, and my passion for teamwork.
Continue reading to see the step-by-step process of how my team and I made our vision come to life
Every year, Oklahoma State University creates a theme for Homecoming. In 2022, this theme was "Hats Off to The Cowboy Heroes."After receiving this theme in March, our team immediately got to work to choose and envision our specific theme, OSU's Fantastic Four that we would go on to showcase on our house decoration 7 months later, at the end of October.
Over the next 5 months, our team spent countless hours meeting on Zoom and in person every week to brainstorm, tweak, and perfect the details on how we wanted to bring our theme to life on our over 1000 square foot pomped house decoration. We decided on distinguished OSU alumni Wally Funk, Garth Brooks, Nancy Randolph Davis, and John Smith as our Fantastic Four.
My role in this part of the process was bringing new ideas every week, sketching out specific parts, and eventually bringing it all together on a final black and white sketch
For the next 2 months, I put myself to work using Photoshop to bring together photos, sketches, and illustrations as the next step of the process.
Towards the end of summer break, I began uploading the designed images into an application called WinStitch, a cross-stitching application, to get them ready to be pomped. These designs would later translate to 18 foot tall panels; thus, each full-size design was a total of 432 squares high and various squares wide, each square a different color than the next. This process of getting a total of 26 individual designs ready by uploading, perfecting them, and assigning symbols to each color on all designs took around 1 1/2 months, just in time for the kickoff of pomping at the end of August.
An approx. 6ft tall by 10ft wide section of 1 panel in color format
An approx. 1.25ft tall by 1ft wide section of 1 panel in symbol format
To prepare for pomping to start, we put up four 8ft x 20ft A-frames to hang chicken wire on each side where the pomping would be completed. We hung the chicken wire, strung the screens into 96 square x 20 square sections, printed and arranged the symbol sheets (shown above), and got to worked with the help of our sorority and fraternity members. After 2 months of pomping, about 50,000 pieces of individual pomp, and countless hours of perfecting the details, it was almost Homecoming weekend.
The Thursday before the big game and Homecoming walkaround, a night of seeing everyone's house decorations or the first time, we were allowed to start piecing our designs together in front of the house by hanging the panels on the metal structure that had been built out front. We stayed up all night as a directing team, a tradition started many years ago at Oklahoma State. Over the 27 hours of this "all-night pomp," we hung our screens, filled in spaces that had been knocked out, and made sure it all came together properly.
After 7 months of brainstorming, designing, building, and pomping, our house decoration was finally done. We showcased our four alumni on each separate panel featuring the history, their accomplishments, and the original Fantastic Four character we believed represented them best. Our 18ft tall by 60ft wide structure consisted of 7 panels, 4 moving parts engineered by our engineering team, and 1 special feature.
We received 4th place in House Decorations and were immensely proud of our hard work and collaboration as a director team.
This 7 month project taught me so much artistically and personally. I taught myself 2 new applications, learned more about color theory, and strengthened my ability to carry out a theme on a large scale project. Personally, I learned a lot about leadership in the face of discouragement, teamwork in completing a seemingly impossible task, and the power of determination.
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