Selected Work | Red Hot Annie
Creative direction and immersive experience design across original worlds, hospitality, brand experiences and live events.
The projects are different because the rooms are different.
Different audience. Different purpose. Different constraints. Different rules for what belongs.
The common thread is the work underneath the work:
What should happen here?
What should people notice first?
How should the room move?
Where should performance appear?
What should remain quiet?
What deserves spectacle?
What should guests discover for themselves?
Selected projects below show how those questions become worlds, environments, performances and experiences.
Have a room, audience or occasion, but not the finished creative answer?
The Pink Hotel
An Original Immersive World
CLIENT / CONTEXT
The Pink Hotel is an original immersive story world created by Red Hot Annie.
Part hotel, part theatre, part social environment, it is populated by residents, staff, rooms, rituals, secrets and performances that continue to develop across live experiences and other forms.
Creative Direction: Red Hot Annie
Original World & Experience Design: Red Hot Annie
Production: Red Hot Annie / Vaudezilla, depending on production
THE CREATIVE PROBLEM
How do you create an immersive world that people can enter without requiring them to understand a complicated story first?
And how do you make that world expandable enough to support performance, hospitality, character, private experiences and future stories without turning it into a theme?
THE DIRECTION
The hotel became the organizing logic.
Guests do not need a synopsis.
They understand rooms.
They understand keys.
They understand staff, residents, invitations, elevators, corridors and places they may or may not be allowed to enter.
That familiar structure creates room for something stranger to happen inside it.
Characters can recur.
Rooms can acquire histories.
A ballroom can behave differently from a private suite.
A guest can encounter one fragment of the world without needing to see everything.
The experience becomes discoverable rather than explained.
WHAT CHANGED
The Pink Hotel created a container large enough to hold many forms of Annie’s work without making every experience identical.
Performance became one part of a larger world.
The audience became guests.
Characters gained lives beyond individual acts.
Rooms became storytelling devices.
Hospitality itself became theatrical material.
THE AFTERIMAGE
The Pink Hotel is not simply a production.
It is an evolving demonstration of how Annie approaches experience design:
Build enough structure that the audience knows how to enter, then leave enough unanswered that they want to keep looking.
Curatrix
Film Noir Fragrance Launch
CLIENT / CONTEXT
Curatrix was introducing a Film Noir fragrance collection inside a luxury retail environment.
The visual world already existed.
The challenge was making that world live in the room.
Creative Direction: Red Hot Annie
Entertainment Production: Vaudezilla
Client: Curatrix
THE CREATIVE PROBLEM
How could live performance strengthen an elegant fragrance launch without turning the event into a stage show?
The performers needed to belong to the environment rather than interrupt it.
The brand needed atmosphere, character and movement while preserving the sophistication of the retail setting.
THE DIRECTION
The collection’s Film Noir identity became the creative filter.
Classic cinema.
Velvet lounges.
Old Hollywood mystery.
An elegant black, red and gold visual language.
Performance was kept intentionally refined.
Rather than importing an existing show, the entertainment was developed around the collection and the behavior of guests inside the space.
The performers did not arrive to demand attention.
They helped establish the rules of the room.
WHAT CHANGED
Entertainment stopped functioning as a separate attraction.
It became part of the product world.
Movement, character and guest interaction extended the fragrance’s identity beyond packaging and display into something guests could encounter physically.
THE RESULT
The activation demonstrated how performance can support a luxury brand without competing with it.
The experience remained recognizably Curatrix.
It simply became inhabited.
Need this kind of thinking on your project?
The aesthetic changes. The underlying work does not: determine what the audience should experience, then make each creative choice support it.
Templeton Rye
Turning Brand Heritage Into Guest Experience
CLIENT / CONTEXT
Templeton Rye brought with it an existing visual and historical language rooted in Prohibition-era America.
The opportunity was not to invent a disconnected theme.
It was to determine how that heritage could influence the behavior and atmosphere of a live event.
Creative Direction: Red Hot Annie
Entertainment Production: Vaudezilla
Client: Templeton Rye Whiskey
THE CREATIVE PROBLEM
A spirits activation can easily become a decorated room with cocktails and hired entertainment.
How could the entertainment make the brand more present without competing with the product itself?
THE DIRECTION
Templeton’s heritage became the starting point.
Vintage performance language, costuming and character supported the world already inherent in the brand.
But historical reference alone was not enough.
The performers needed a social function.
Their presence helped create opportunities for conversation, photography and guest interaction while maintaining an atmosphere in which people could still gather, drink and connect.
WHAT CHANGED
Entertainment became connective tissue.
Instead of waiting for a scheduled show, guests encountered the brand world throughout the experience.
The historical reference moved from visual styling into human behavior.
THE RESULT
The product remained the center of the activation.
Performance gave the room movement, personality and a stronger sense of place.
Midtown Athletic Club
Summer Masquerade
CLIENT / CONTEXT
Midtown Athletic Club was creating a sophisticated masquerade celebration for members.
The evening included live music, conversation, cocktails and performance.
It did not need constant entertainment.
It needed rhythm.
Creative Direction: Red Hot Annie
Entertainment Production: Vaudezilla
Client: Midtown Athletic Club
THE CREATIVE PROBLEM
How do you introduce theatrical performance into a social evening without asking guests to stop having the evening they came to have?
And how do you keep multiple entertainment elements from competing for the same attention?
THE DIRECTION
The answer was not more performance.
It was placement.
Rather than allowing entertainment to run continuously, featured masquerade performances were positioned around breaks in the live violin music.
The room could breathe.
Conversation had space.
Then attention could gather again.
The visual language stayed closer to Venetian elegance than theatrical excess, supporting the setting rather than overwhelming it.
WHAT CHANGED
Entertainment gained an arc.
Music and performance stopped behaving like unrelated vendors sharing a timeline.
They began functioning as parts of the same evening.
When weather forced the event from its planned rooftop setting into an interior theatre space, the experience was adapted to the new room rather than rigidly preserving a plan designed for somewhere else.
THE RESULT
The creative structure survived the production change.
Guests experienced an evening with deliberate alternation between social time, atmosphere and theatrical focus.
Behind the scenes, the room had changed.
The experience still made sense.
Different Projects. Same Question.
Creative direction is not the imposition of one recognizable aesthetic onto every client.
Curatrix should not look like Templeton Rye.
Templeton Rye should not behave like Midtown.
A corporate room should not automatically become The Pink Hotel.
The work is finding the idea already latent in the project, then determining what will make that idea perceptible to the people actually experiencing it.
That may involve:
concept
story world
guest journey
casting
character
music
movement
performance
visual language
spatial experience
audience interaction
timing
surprise
restraint
or simply deciding which idea is strong enough to organize everything else.
The Role
There is an important distinction between creative direction and production.
Red Hot Annie can be brought into a project to determine what the experience should become, establish its creative language and direct the guest-facing experience.
She can work alongside an existing agency, planner, producer, venue or internal creative team.
When the direction requires casting, performers, rehearsals and entertainment production, Vaudezilla can provide that execution layer.
Sometimes Annie directs and another team produces.
Sometimes Annie directs and Vaudezilla produces.
The structure follows the project.
Learn More About Creative Direction →
Need full entertainment production, casting and performer management?
What Are You Trying to Create?
You do not need to have the answer yet.
You may already have the venue.
The audience.
The client brief.
The date.
The partners.
Maybe even a collection of very good ideas.
If the part that remains unresolved is what all of it should become, that is a useful place to begin.
Explore Creative Direction →
Enter The Pink Hotel →
Vaudezilla Production →