Welcome Back Travel Agency

Welcome Back Travel Agency is a whimsical event photo booth experience Shizuka Nagahama and I made with assistance from @aaa_tu for the October 2022 This&That Café event. Being the first in-person This&That Café event since the COVID-19 pandemic the theme of the event was "Welcome Back". In that line we created an experience where event goers took back with them photos of themselves in whimsical, fictitious worlds representing their ideas of “home”.

On the day of the event we were adorned in partially hand-made 1950s Golden Age of Flight styled flight attendant costumes. We welcomed event goers and asked them first to type in their home destination, whether literal, conceptual, however they wanted to describe it and in whatever form it took for them. Next we took their photos in preparation for their journey. At this point we sent them off into the show, asking them to come by anytime during the evening for their travel itinerary.

In the meanwhile we fed their description of home into an image generation AI model with a few of our own additional styling tweaks to match with the photo booth experience’s Golden Age of Flight aesthetic. One of the resulting generated images was selected and used as a backdrop of their send-off photo to create an image of them going "home". The two were edited together and presented to the event goer, much to their surprise and delight.

The resulting images created are viewable here.