We helped Westfield’s customers get into the Christmas spirit last year by setting up a custom Awkward Christmas Photos booth at the Carindale shopping centre.
The booth was created to allow Westfield shoppers to recreate some classic awkward family poses forced upon the family (by mum usually, let’s face it). We created a complete set of a stereotypical 1970s lounge from scratch, including wood panelling printed backdrop, lurid carpet and some pretty ugly furniture of the era.
We built our standard photo booth tech into a retro set of drawers to blend in with the deco, and our social media sharing iPads were incorporated into the festive family dining table, allowing guests to immediately share images onto their social feeds. They also took away free, branded prints of their efforts as mementos, with all images featuring our added 70s scratchy filter.
As an added incentive, Westfield ran a ‘most awkward pose’ contest on Instagram (awkaward anyone?) giving away $500 shopping vouchers as first prize. Our staff were on hand to advise on weird poses, but many participants came in with some cracking arrangements of their own…
The booth was a huge hit across the ten days it was running in the lead-up to Christmas. Queues were common so our staff entertained those waiting with a special guide to awkward posing and a few examples of the quirkiest so far.
We supplied all the props for the lounge of awkwardness too, with nasty Christmas jumpers, taped-up glasses, reindeer antlers and more. Guests could also flip through previous results in a 70s-themed ‘family album’ we created.
Creating the 70s lounge set was great fun for our team and went down a storm with Westfield shoppers. Our boss Sophie was especially keen on the task as she got to indulge in her favourite passtime of op shopping for weird furniture for the set.
Awksome
Okay then, down to the fun stuff… let’s have a flick through some of our favourite poses from grandma’s couch.
The lunge
The reindeer train
The wail of a time
The chin chin
The friend zone
(These cool cats decided to include an absent friend by getting his photo up on an iPad!)
The cheeky reverse straddle
The family pyramid
The parental advisory
The reindeer rider
The seedy lean-in
With all this awks fun being had, our team couldn’t resist getting involved… here’s a few of our team getting uncomfortable.
Alex getting some sofa time with Chewie. Just… because.
Angela and her wife Sophie doing a little something we call the awkward baby pose (or something).
Sophie, Nic and their boys absolutely smashing the very popular ‘stack’.
Jess and Steve, plus Jess’s parents doing the ambitious double reverse straddle. Truly awks.
And here’s a little video we put together too with a few highlights. Let’s. Get. Awkward.
Any of you planning a Christmas party or activation? Please do get in touch and we can chat through some ideas!
As well as our standard Christmas backdrops and props we LOVE playing with the huge variety of cool stuff we have, in order to come up with perfect custom installations.