Origin Story
My Career
Our Team
Our Methods

Origin Story:

A long and tedious history of how I came to make themed parties, starting from my youth.

Our method, really my method of party throwing has solidified over many years of doing my best, making mistakes and trying again. I’ve been “throwing” parties since I was a teenager. Ironically I was never much into “partying” which to me is a bunch of people getting together in a wild drunken bash (other kinds of debauchery omitted for brevity). Sure I’ve been to some of those – and had a good time even, but it really isn’t my thing -. More importantly, a “party” to me is a name I give to what I do because it most closely resembles what I am trying to do. If I could, I’d be running an immersive theme park with various themed pavilions, not unlike what I work on for a living. They have shows and rides, and food and drink, music and excitement. Unfortunately I don’t have a hundred million dollars lying around to do this, so the next best thing is to do it temporarily – one night or maybe two. I’ve worked on haunted houses that weren’t mine that were open for a week. A party is just what one would call getting to go to a theme park environment for a few hours. – a theme park at home. I had helped others in high school throw parties – the wild kind as it were but I would show up when it started, hang around for an hour and leave before most people got there. My first party was at my parents when they were away on a trip when I was a teenager. I went to the trouble of borrowing a pool table (and then returning it), getting a keg of beer (I was only 17 and didn’t even drink any of the beer), and trying to keep it a secret from my parents. My next party was when I was 22 – a Halloween party October 1990 – I had it in the house I was renting a room from off Lake Sherwood, CA. I had just met my future wife-to-be and she was actually helping me. Lake Sherwood is a well-to-do neighborhood, and my neighbor who was quite wealthy attended the party and asked me to to throw a birthday party for his wife, and gave me $10,000 to do it. I ended up spending $6,000 on the party and kept the remaining $4,000 as a fee. They loved it and this gave me the idea that I was good at doing this – not sure if that is a good or bad thing – time will tell I guess. I did in fact subsequently get married, left working in aerospace and moved to Orlando, FL to work for a 5 person company in theme parks. I enjoyed the engineering of aerospace but really felt at home in entertainment – I learned so much working on theme parks – after Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 (I was 30) I had already started my own theme park engineering company, and returned to Los Angeles with my wife and two daughters. I hadn’t thrown a single party the entire time I was in Florida due to raising a family. My marriage ended in divorce in 2001, and my friend Ryan who moved in with me to my house in Pine Mountain Club in 2002 asked me what I wanted to do to cheer up, and so we threw a Christmas Party for my friends and some clients and went way over the top. The house was a large house and had a large deck and was a great space for throwing a party. I proceeded to throw other over-the-top Christmas parties, Halloween parties, a Hawaiian party, a James Bond International Spy party, a Pirate party, with various girlfriends. The Hawaiian party was probably my largest to that point, with two live bands, an open bar, Hawaiian food, tiki torches, a tiki bar, and a ton of “Party City quality” decorations. After that I started to go bigger each time, more elaborate, and by 2009, the rest is history! I met my current wife in 2011 and we married in 2014 (I helped plan the wedding – I remember Lily saying “You want to help plan the wedding? Are you any good at event planning??? Ha! So there was a period of a few years where we didn’t have any event, and I didn’t want to scare her away that I do this, but then she wanted to be involved!!! The gap in parties from 2018 to 2023 is obvious – the pandemic hit. We planned originally on having the Prohibition Party in 2021.

My Career:

I was very lucky to work for the British Government in the Aerospace industry, but at 23 I tired of building things that might hurt people even though they were defensive in nature, and I had an opportunity to go into the Theme Park industry and I took it. I moved to Orlando, taking the first captive (employee, not consultant) position at the show control, audio, and video company Alcorn McBride, a major supplier to Disney, Universal and so on, where I wrote entirely by myself the first version of their WinScript software, wrote firmware for microcontrollers on their products circuit boards, and generally assisted with the electronics, and did tech support, and for a number of years, I was the head of Sales too! From there I started my own company Granite Precision Inc. at 27 mostly as a theme park consultant on the side. After Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, I took a position back here in Los Angeles at Level Control Systems, an audio playback and sound mixing equipment for the Cirque du Soleil shows fronted by esteemed sound designer Johnathan Deans, later bought by Meyer Sound, and also increased work at Granite Precision, making media servers for Walt Disney Imagineering. Eventually I turned my work for LCS into consulting work, freeing me to do what I wanted and how I wanted to do it for the rest of my life at 29 years old. Since then Granite Precision has for 20 years made the Integrated Media Server, and improved media server from what I was making for WDI directly, with built-in real-time control at the suggestion of my head contact at WDI. I’m thankful through all these years that I’ve gotten to work on the world’s newest and coolest theme park and other themed attractions. Since then, I’ve restarted doing consulting work, which has dominated what I do since the Pandemic, with my company Black Ops Engineering. In 2003 I started the company C47 Entertainment, which took on mostly post-production film work, although we had a full production package. When a tremendous amount of the film industry left for Vancouver, a lot of that work dried up and I transitioned C47 into work-for-hire to professionally create immersive, themed party and event experiences, while still retaining our film production and post-production capabilities. This site, Theme Park at Home, represents my personal themed projects.

Working in the theme park industry in primarily show control, audio, video, and lighting has been a great experience, but I would watch all the creative design work others did at all those attractions and I couldn’t help but feel I would have loved to have done some of that work, even though my skill set lie in electronics design, and microprocessor and computer programming. There are so many highly talented creative people out there, and I am certainly not one of them, but I still wanted to be creative anyway, and I found out that others (friends) did too. Thus I slowly started to put these efforts into one day theme park experiences, a Theme Park at Home.

Jeff Long

Our Crew:

Throughout the years I have had the absolute pleasure of working with some of the most talented people on these projects. They’re also the most giving. I could never have accomplished these larger events the last 10 years without help. There’s just too much to do, and their unique skills have helped me to be able to do things I never could have done even with a hundred years of time, and helped me not to do stupid things as well. Over time I’ve been able to gather a “crew” of people who work on the parties with me. Occasionally people come and go as life works like that, and they’re volunteering after all, but having a core group of people I can rely on is really valuable. It’s not quite the staff of 130 crew and cast that we had at Riverton Cemetery back in the late 90s, early 00s, but more of theme are actual theme park and film people. I try my best to take care of my crew, and I certainly feed them really well, but I’ll never be able to truly make up for their efforts or thank them enough.

Our Methods:

Many people throw parties – they put on some music, put out some food and drink, and put up decorations. There’s nothing wrong with that at all – it’s financially feasible, it’s not overly time-consuming, it usually isn’t too bad to clean up, and everyone has a blast. That said, if you’re just a little nuts, you can go farther.

It’s time to do a new event when the old one has been taken down and some time has passed (Translation: When my wife has stopped being sick to death of having our house be a construction site and has thankfully forgotten just a little bit of how crazy it makes our lives for at least a year (in the case of the Gold Rush Party, two years) with people coming and going at all hours). We talk between us about what theme interests us, and how we might accomplish it. We then do the same with the Crew at a meeting. Sometimes ideas are pie in the sky, but we can always take on any theme – the difficulty lies in how far can you implement it?

What theme we pick is not trivial. We’ll live with this decision for a long time and it will take time and money we could have used for other things. Some ideas that cross our path on occasion:

• Do we made a Pirate theme? Guests would arrive to find a pirate ship the size of my house sitting in a “ocean” bay with cannons firing cannonballs above their heads.
• Do we made a Game of Thrones theme? The guests would arrive to our property with a closed 80 ft. high 20 ft. wide log gate with snow on the ground… and there seems to be something flying in the air? What is that? It has wings…

It’s just time and money, right? One does have to pay for these things.

Once we have a theme we work on it. What can we do? What do we already have to make this happen? We have a lot of props in storage. We have lots of gear. We know how to do these things, and if we don’t we can find out how. Can we do it for free, can we get it for free, can we borrow it? Can we buy it on sale? Can we use it in the future? Can we do this some cheaper way? Is this really worth the time or money?

When we decide what we want to do for the event, we try to come with as many things that make sense given the location, space, time of year, cost, and what else we’re already doing. For the Gold Rush Party we had a ride. For the Prohibition Party we didn’t have a dark ride, but instead we built a ride simulator and had actors with a skit and special effects. Is one better than the other? Maybe, but we try to mix it up each time.

One of the main things I try to do with each event is make sure we have three things I can point to and say “Those three things are so overwhelmingly cool that guests will be floored”. It has to be at least three – it’s better if there are more. In the case of the Mardi Gras Party and the Prohibition Party, we expected the live band to be good but we didn’t expect them to be jaw-dropping great – but for those events the bands were so good it made the party. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, it usually is some unique not-usually-at-a-party thing that makes the list but it doesn’t have to be.

Our Events always have a special scene that they walk through to get to the actual party (or in the case of the Gold Rush Party, ride through). The idea is that this part of the party is very theme park like and you’re experiencing it without the food and drink or social discussion with friends. You and your guest(s) are focusing on the theming itself for the one to three minutes it takes to experience this first scene, then they are surrounded in theming but free to move about and do as they like (usually).

In each party, we use something from the last party – a visible prop, not just the same speakers or light fixture. Once in a while a guest notices that they’ve seen it before, but not usually. It’s a sort of homage to past events.

What makes these parties really fun for me is the challenge of pulling off what we set to pull off. It’s the time spent for months with friends building and creating and so on. It’s not the party itself. The party itself is sort of like the awards ceremony for doing all the work the past few months or more. You’re properly bathed and clean, dressed up, either in costume or just nice clothes. You haven’t slept much in days and are ready to fall over. You smile at people and say “thank you for coming” but you’re really out of it and won’t remember most of it.” The exception to that is that often you get to see a guests look of disbelief, and that is alone makes it worth it.