Franz Aliquo’s Insane Projects Are Making Your Summer Great Again
… and how he said “Fuck you” to being a lawyer and became one of the craziest creatives in NYC
We’re back with another Member Spotlight, because our members are always up to something awesome!
This week, we’re bringing you the wild machinations of Franz Aliquo, Creative Director for new creative shop — AVG Consulting. You may know him as one of the crazy guys who did that cross-country trip in a Tesla on autopilot.
We approached Franz, hoping he’d drop a line or two about a project he was working on. Nope. Because the man is part creative genius, part mad marketing scientist, one project at a time is not nearly enough.
We got to chatting about the many ideas he was juggling, from weekly post-work field trips to abandoned mental institutions, to Smart Car drag-racing. If you’re already looking towards summer for some crazy activities to get up to, then look no further, because Franz has you covered.
Check out our conversation below:
What’s your background?
I used to be a securities litigation attorney. Starting Street Wars allowed me to transition to this other field. I’ve been working in advertising for the past eleven or twelve years, and through that I met two amazing people in their fields, Jon Vidar and Kate Gardiner, and we realized that all of our skills were powerful and dovetailed really nicely. So we said “fuck it” and formed up — Voltron style — to create AVG.
So what have you got in the works?
In New York we’re working on a kind of updated version of my Rental Car Rallies. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it has a concept. It’s going to be an outer-borough car rally using only Car2Go’s or Smart cars.
It’ll take off on Friday at midnight and take you on a tour of bizarre abandoned places, bizarre people, and interesting experiences around the city in a kind of madcap scavenger hunt. It’ll involve a dark alley that I discovered that’s a little bit longer than a block long and is a one-way dead-end street. So we will be forcing people to do, whatchamacallit, smart car drag racing.
Oh, is that all?
Nope! Now that the weather is breaking, I’m going to bring back Adventure Night, which is a kind of after-work series. This all started because I’m not a big drinker, I kind of hate going to bars. But particularly on a Thursday night, people always want to do something after work. And I felt like a jackass refusing to engage, so I decided to do something about it. Which is how Adventure Night started.
Over the sort of “beta test”, I’d rent a passenger van every Thursday at 8pm and take people out and bring them back by midnight — Cinderella rules. We go on a three-hour adventure anywhere in the five boroughs. I’m really big into visiting abandoned mental institutions. It’s all about exploring all these weird and interesting things that occur and exist in New York.
We’re relaunching that this summer, but we’re also doing it simultaneously in Los Angeles and San Francisco, with the same penchant for abandoned places. What I learned from the beta in New York, is that if you get a group of people that don’t know each other, then take them to an abandoned place like this, you get them to feel like kids again. All this pop-culture education people have, from 80’s Hollywood references to video games, resurfaces, and it’s this amazing experience. It pushes people to be a little uncomfortable. And after that, when you realize that nothing bad happens, you come out a bolder person.
And what about Street Wars, are we going to be seeing another one soon?
I think we’re doing that again this summer! Probably in July. At the end of that month, I’m probably moving to LA, so I figure I’m going to throw our swan song before then. Swan song Street Wars!
Right now what we’re working on is totally revamping the back-end of it. So it becomes a lot cleaner and a lot more shareable. Most of your experience, your pics, your updates, only exist within our closed system. We’re building that to be more open so it’s easier for people to follow and join in. And in terms of the gameplay itself — the reason we haven’t had it in NYC the past couple of years — it started to feel like it had become a little stagnant with regards to action experiences. Over the course of the thirty days, you’d probably have that action movie experience — running across the rooftops, getting into a car-chase — like six or seven times. The rest is just waiting, and feeling paranoid, which is also good but we felt we needed to add structure and add more opportunities to inject that sort of adrenaline into the event.
Part of that is giving people side missions that make people enter a different world. For example, in London, we did this live-action recreation of The Purge, and as part of that, we had rented a bunch of apartments and businesses in the general play area, so if our players — or rather, when our players — would end up in one of those locations, some bananas shit would happen.
I was able to recreate one of those iconic horror movie moments, that Jason moment, where no matter where the campers run or how fast, they turn a corner and he’s there. In the overall structure of the game, I embedded certain people as players in the groups. I used an app to track those people so that I could always set the groups up for these terrifying moments.
That’s really the core of Street Wars and a lot of my work — it’s kind of making moments from entertainment real, turning peoples lives into what they see in movies or in video games. I see something cray, I want to live it, so I build something that allows me to recreate it, but not in some janky way. You want to make a moment feel like something you would see in a Hollywood flick, because anything less than that is disappointing. And I hate being disappointed.
How do you juggle all this?
I have no life, this is the type of shit I do in my free time. I really get off on producing shit and seeing my ideas come to life. It all usually starts as a joke, that’s how a lot of the ideas happen. You talk to some people and see how far it goes until it fails. So I take something until it ends or it happens.
Who else is ready for this summer? Stay tuned for updates on the return of Street Wars and Rental Car Rally 2017, you know we’ll be following up for sign-up deets!
This piece is part of our Member Spotlight interview series — a weekly feature that lets us highlight all the amazing stuff The New Stand Members are working on. Got something you’d like to showcase? Email us at hello@thenewstand.com
