Everything is Everything

Streamlining the design around Center Camp

This year, several threads tied together my Burning Man experience: a resolution to create love rather than seek it, to tell those around me that I love them, and that for me, the burn is about learning and practicing to be a better human. Another theme presented itself over and

The biggest 360º video ever made

On Tuesday we dropped the #Catquarium. Check it out, two hours in a 360º cat cafe which you can watch on just your cell phone. No headset required! Click to watch the #Catquarium • It’s a 360º Cat Cafe • It’s two hours long • It’s 1 trillion pixels big

The #Catquarium n How We Made It

Today we are releasing the most epic cat video ever created. Anything you want in a cat video is happening here, somewhere. It’s two hours, in 360º three dimensional virtual reality, that anyone can experience on their phone or computer. Check it out at thecatquarium.com — load it on

Planning and Flaking: Can We Do This Better?

I’m hosting a discussion on Jan 7 at The Embassy in San Francisco called “Planning and Flaking: Can We Do This Better?” Here are some thoughts to start the discussion: The year is 1957. You’re sitting on the couch, eating a string bean casserole and finally getting around

Take Control of your Facebook: Search is Back

I love Facebook. Never before in the history of the human race have so many people been organized so well. Within seconds I can find reach out to almost everyone I’ve ever met, creating the start of a powerful hivemind. The UX of the site is generally well-done, and

Making Larry David happy

The Nametag Day Kickstarter ends today, and I’m experiencing a mix of excitement and relief. It’s not very much fun to be in a position of holding your hand out for money. I also would much prefer sending a single message: “Volunteer with us! It’s free!” rather

Lily in the Grinder released on Vimeo

Here it is! Free at last! After a year of work and over twenty film festival screenings, I am exhilarated to tell you that today, Lily in the Grinder becomes free on Vimeo and YouTube. Watch it again. Watch it for the first time. Ponder existence. Less than 5,000

Color Correction before and after: Lily in the Grinder

As part of the Lily in the Grinder release, I’m making available a before-and-after comparison which will give you a sense of the weeks of work that happened between the raw camera video and the finished product. Take a look: Broadly, the video went through several stages during this

Transparent JPEGs are within our reach. Can we make it happen?

I built a website with a large image in the center and a CSS3 gradient behind it. It’s kind of silly that I’m spending 880kb on a PNG file just to get transparency, I thought. Transparency is just RGB channels plus an alpha channel. While JPEG doesn’t

Every film is an achievement

Every film is an achievement. The film your kid made with a gopro and iMovie. The student short made with $400 and borrowed equipment. That dumb film that isn’t color corrected very well. The studio movie made with too much money that looks, to your eyes, dumb and middling

The Everythingis Film Festival: Eight Curated Short Films

(Cross-posted with The Huffington Post) Eight curated short films – an early holiday present! I’m looking for scripts, hard. In addition to developing two features with co-writers and a few myself, I set out to find and connect with talented writers and see what they have cooking. We’ve set

Type in the air, live in the future

A few years ago I was waiting for a glove keyboard. It seemed that with the rise proliferation of devices that don’t sit on a desk — cell phones, wearable devices like Google Glass or Oculus Rift, etc., we will be needing input devices. The coolest one seemed like a

Would regulated warranty plans help save the environment?

I was talking to Nick about what I’ll call The Ikea Problem: cheaper, poorly made products appear to be more cost-effective than more expensive ones. If an expensive product will last many times longer, it’s usually cheaper over time. Ikea furniture is a perfect example: a $250 table

Dreaming of 9-5's

I move to San Francisco with big promises, and big plans, and announcements. Things are going great. I have a five year plan. Lily promotions take up lots of time. A commercial business is taking off. And yet, when I close my eyes, I dream of nine to fives. It’

Citizenfour, an incredible documentary about Edward Snowden

I went to the bathroom once during the screening of Citizenfour. It took about a half hour before I felt comfortable leaving to miss what was onscreen, and when I walked back I noticed the room was 10º warmer than outside and filled with the smell of sweat. We were

Definitive Guide to DIY Film Festival Distribution: 10 Steps

Cross-posted with Huffington Post. I was at a San Francisco Film Society party last night speaking to someone who had just had to do a festival distribution for a friend’s short film. “It’s hard!” they said, and I found myself commiserating. Putting a film out there through the

Ello isn't going to work: Six things it doesn't address.

Cross-posted with The Huffington Post. Why are people excited about Ello? Because they can’t wait to leave Facebook. Why do so many people want off Facebook? That’s the problem: everybody has a different reason. Ello is a new social network that has caught fire with a manifesto telling

Five easy ways not to waste other peoples' time

1. Make sure you’ve said everything you want to say in an email. I use Gmail’s Undo Send, which gives me a whole 30 seconds to rethink what I’ve said in case I want to add anything. 2. Keep a list of things you want to talk

Lily in the Grinder is out!

More later. For now:

The 400 Blows Photo Project

Apologies to my millions of followers for never updating this blog 🙂 I’ve been working in Paris with Ted Walch, who teaches drama at Harvard-Westlake (you can see this amazing tribute the school paid to him last month here) and Philippe Thimel, who has an encyclopedic understanding of Paris, to

A counterpoint to ideology

Cross-posted with The Huffington Post I watched the fireworks after watching monster trucks and motocross racing in Pomona, surrounded by many people who think differently than I do. In this time, I had occasion to think about ideology. While it is easy to disdain blind nationalism and patriotism, I think

Nametag Day NYC is back June 7. And it's spreading. Join us!

Last June we handed out over 10,000 nametags in an effort to make NYC a friendlier place for a day. It was an incredible day of joy as thousands of new connections were made and a whole swath of the city thought about their neighbors in a slightly different

Lily in the Grinder screening on April 1st!

Cast crew & you screening April 1 // 7pm Anthology Film Archives Quick, RSVP now! Hiya! If you’ve followed its journey on Facebook, you know that though Lily in the Grinder is a short film, it’s taken the work of over 50 people and the better part of a year

The rise of the feature article

I  spent the better part of a week completing The Dark Power of Fraternities written by Caitlin Flanagan, which was on the cover of  The Atlantic this month. Weighing in at over 15,000 words, the behemoth of an article was consumed on my computer and on the subway with

Ten things I did to distribute Shabbat Dinner

In the space of four weeks, life can change dramatically. It’s hard to believe that it’s been so little time, but looking at my calendar I am forced to conclude that it has. Yo, watch Shabbat Dinner if you haven’t already! (Did I say that yet?) Yo,