Using an Arduino to automatically sense the water level and turn on a pump
That heat wave is bad. And my air conditioner loves dripping wetting the floor. Last year I tried to solve it with a water level sensor, an Arduino, and a relay to turn the power on and off automatically. But the sensor corroded after just a few months....
Nexus Short Film
Alright, this post is incredibly overdue, but I made a new short film! I started this post like four times at different points in the process. One before the IndieGoGo campaign, one in pre-prodution, etc. But I always got busy by working on the short, and never got...
How to read screenplays on an e-reader
The advent of e-readers like the Kindle or Nook made reading on the go easier than ever. Well, for books anyway. The problem with Screenplays (typically shared as PDFs) is that e-readers will typically give you two options to read PDFs. Either cram the full page into...
Kepler – Guerreros
I recently directed this action music video for a cool band, Kepler. The lead vocals, Carlos Peña is a singer from Guatemala who won Latin American Idol in 2007. We happen to know each other since we were newborns due to the fact that we're cousins. So when he needed...
Google Glass and Jetpacks
My friend Rebecca let us borrow her Google Glass so we could take them jetpacking. I was nervous about flying with Glass over the ocean, but I saw other videos and pictures of people using it on a water slide and in the shower, so I decided to give it a shot. I didn't...
The obvious problem finding backers on Kickstarter (in hindsight)
There's a lesson I learned when launching my failed Kickstarter campaign. It seems obvious now, but I just didn't see it before when I was working on my campaign. It's very simple and it's something every good marketer knows: Your Twitter and Facebook friends are not...
When a Kickstarter campaign fails: 6 tips and lessons I learned the hard way
Not too long ago I launched a Kickstarter campaign for a web series I wrote called Bionique. We had one episode and a kick-ass trailer that everybody liked. Some people thought it looked like a regular TV show. But the campaign failed... miserably. We were asking...
Kickstarter vs IndieGoGo: Choosing the right platform
This seems to be the eternal question, there's a million articles out there with the pros and cons about each one. In the end, I realized it doesn't matter that much. For our campaign we decided to go with Kickstarter mainly for two reasons: Recognizability First I...
Why I stopped making people look younger and thinner
It is widely known that models and celebrities never look in real life like they do in pictures. Magazines and ads in particular are famous for photoshopping the hell out of them. You know... Take a pimple out, or wrinkles, remove a double chin, add a six pack, etc....
How to get paid for acting and stop waiting tables
Go to any restaurant or coffee shop in or around Hollywood and you'll find that your servers lead double lives, 'I'm really an actor' one will say with pride while pulling out a shiny business card with his/her headshot on it. When people outside the industry think of...