Brought to you by the creative minds behind Pencil Fighting: The Life and Times of Team Balderdash, the 20-minute short Inventing Kin is a dramedy about missed opportunities and life's second chances. It's close in spirit to Zach Braff's Garden State, which was also about a lost soul returning home to make peace with the past. This new film lacks the broad characterizations that made Pencil Fighting so memorable, but it displays some of the quirkiness that sets the films of Fro Rojas apart. (Full disclosure: Rojas and I both went to Miami International University of Art & Design, where we made a film together.)

The Hottest Latin Film School: International School of Film and Television San Antonio de los Baños- CUBA

As a filmmaker, deciding what film school to go to is quite a difficult task. You want to pick the best place possible to prepare you for your career, and then several other things go into play, like your budget and your family situation. When I was in the process of choosing an undergrad film school, it all came down to four schools for me: USC, NYU, U of Miami and EICTV. USC was crossed out because California seemed too far from my family in NY and South America. NYU I excluded because I wanted to try living in a new place from where I had grown up, so my last two choices were

University of Miami and EICTV in Cuba.

No, silly, not Pedro Almodóvar. Even though my last two Blogs were about master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, this CineBlog is about a completely different Pedro. MTV's Pedro Zamorra.

Last night I attended a screening of PEDRO at the Colony Theater in South Beach. This film opened the line-up for the 2009 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival to a sold-out crowd and a standing ovation. PEDRO is the life story of the young AIDS activist Pedro Zamorra, Miami's own Cuban American, who was part of the cast of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, and died at the age of 22, soon after the show finished airing its last episode in 1994.

So you want to be an actor? You heard of the term "shoot", right? Photographers, Directors, Cinematographers, Cowboys – they all use this term. Now, to get the term right, when it comes to acting it means you need to know that without having your head shot in the right way you are D-E-A-D in this town (or any other town, for that matter). I mean, shot like it matters, the actor's attitude matters, their hair and make-up matters, the clothes matter, the colors matter, why even the manner in which you get it to the right agent or manager or casting director MATTERS. Alright, so I had a small head-start, I've had headshots done by four other photographers before and only two out of a million shots were chosen to be what my then agents in Miami thought could actually sell me. After showing my manager out here in LA the headshots that had gotten me decent work over the years on the east coast, he laughed, burped, farted, and then asked me to burn them. Which after much suffering... I did. Suffering from the gaseous response, I mean.

How many times has this happened to you? You're watching a movie or a TV show and you know exactly where they're shooting... but you know that it may have been shot better somewhere else? Or you're watching something and now you have ideas of your own to shoot something but you don't know where to go to get the shot? Have you ever needed the perfect place to shoot a scene but can't afford to hire a location scout because you're a student or you're broke? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you should probably read this in case you're hoping to shoot in the Magic City... Miami, FL.

What are the three most important things in setting up business in the filmmaking business? Survey says: Location, Location, Location... Okay, now that we've got that down, you know that without it you'll be shooting in your mother's kitchen and in your father's garage, which per say is not a bad thing, unless that is... you have a lot of "on-location" type of shooting to do, then you need to get out and find it, Fast. First: Where does the story take place, what time of year, season? Do I need permits to shoot outside in public? Do you need seclusion, privacy in public? Do you need to stop a busy road but can't afford it? Well, I'm going to make this blog interactive by taking all specified questions you may have and answering them to the best of my knowledge. To boot, I know of thousands of different streets, alleys, bars, clubs, hotels, motels, houses, tourist traps, historical info, from who to grease for the shot and who not to, what places are camera crazy, I'm talking about anything about a location you need I might be able to help.

More than 700 people came out to the Aventura Mall on Thursday, Oct. 23, to attend the premiere of Director, a low-budget action movie shot in Miami.

It was a real coup for filmmaker Aleks Rosenberg, who both directed and served as the director of photography on the film. The maker of one previous feature, 2001's award-winning Zelimo, Rosenberg now teaches in the film department of Miami International University of Art & Design. He said he'd spent the last week-and-a-half working round-the-clock in the editing suite, making last-minute tweaks to prepare the film for its world premiere. The producers sent out invitations to more than 200 journalists, and the response was so enormous they had to rent out a second screen to show the film on.

Knowing what you want to do in life after college, or any other institution’s release of one’s mind, is only a third of the way in the trajectory to becoming something, anything in this privileged slice of life we call America. To the contrary if you don’t know what you want to do and start out in life, after being ‘educated’, with a natural curiosity for things that absolutely feed your sense of wonder and interest, then I feel there is more room for soul searching and experiential gatherings of knowledge.