Dear Me, If there’s nothing on your cutting room floor when you are “done”, then you probably aren’t doing your best work. If your final product is pretty similar to your first idea then one of these is probably true: Your idea was a very simple one to execute.You don’t care too much about developin...
When I was considering seating for The Eureka Room, my first thought was white, 60’s, futuristic looking ones. I quickly realized: 1) They were not in my budget. 2) You couldn’t fit that many in the room anyways. I ended up actually using some benches I’ve had on my porch for years (Since a previous...
Dear Me, Suppose you are considering a new project to invest yourself into. If you don’t care if anyone will ever want to look at, buy, or consider your project then just follow your passion and go for it. But if your goal is to have someone else get excited about, take interest in, pay for, o...
Dear Me, Are you sitting trying to find the button in Final Cut do the thing you want it to do? Do you think that you have to go the long way round to get things done and that it has to be challenging and take a lot of time because it’s important? Does your gut tell you there must be an easier way?...
I made a 300 sq foot cornhole game as a promotional tool for my calendar company, Big Weekend Calendars. It was part of an experimental event series I did for the (soon-to-be-a-lot-less-useful), Austin Events 2020 wall calendar. I had the idea to paint the cover of the calendar on the giant board bu...
When visitors come to the Eureka Room they’re going to be invited to do something. The “something” could even be something as passive as sitting and watching a program. But no matter what they are invited to do, they are giving something to The Eureka Room: their time, their money, their atten...
The Eureka Room is the size it is due to two main factors: 1) The size of the room that I had available to put it in. 2) The materials available to me. Most materials come in 8 foot lengths. 2x4s, 4x8 plywood, 4x8 plexiglass. You can get bigger sizes but you pay way more than you do for standard siz...
The 14000 LEDs of The Eureka Room could easily be made into a futuristic onslaught of fast moving, jittery, twitchy lights. In my experience, a majority of tech-based/LED art stuff takes this route. And a lot of people enjoy it. (In fact, I’ve had a handful of disappointed visitors lament that they...
The way you mix colors in light is different from the way you mix colors in paint or other solids. If you put all the paint colors together you get black or grey. If you put all the colors of light together you get white. (I vaguely recall doing a report on this in the 5th grade using three flashlig...
One of the things I’ve realized with The Eureka Room is that LEDs are good at some colors and not good at others. Red, Blue, Green, Yellow - great. Purples and Cyans - amazing. Brown? Not so easy. I was trying to create some coffee looking images in the room and no matter what shade of b...