Creative
Direction

Before There Was a Collection

This was my first collection ever.

I had never built a clothing release, directed a campaign, or attempted anything on this scale before. I was completely new to it, but even then I knew I didn’t want to simply make clothes and put them online. I wanted the release to have an idea behind it.

The concept had been developing for close to a year before anyone saw it.

At the time, I had started a job working in the fields. My schedule was 5AM to 7PM, Monday through Friday. Long days outside meant working through extreme heat, cold mornings, and hours where there wasn’t much to do except work and think.

And I thought constantly about my present, my past, my future, and the clothing brand I wanted to start.

I knew I wanted more from myself.

The Escape Plan

Eventually I gave myself a plan.

I had roughly eight months left in the year, so I decided that for those eight months my life was going to be extremely simple:

Work.
Work out.
Eat.
Sleep.
Repeat.

No going out. No wasting time. Just tunnel vision.

I would work during the day, train after work, and use whatever time and mental space I had left to plan TDOM.

At that point I had no idea whether any of it would actually work. I definitely didn’t know it would grow into what it eventually became.

I just knew I wanted to give the idea a real chance.

The Death of Me

While planning the collection, I started thinking about how to physically communicate the meaning behind the name.

TDOM — The Death Of Me.

The idea of digging a grave felt almost obvious.

Ironically, my job had already given me plenty of experience digging. I spent so much time doing physical work in the fields that digging a grave roughly the size of my own body on my days off didn’t feel impossible.

So I did it.

The grave became one of the central visual ideas for the project.

I wasn’t interested in creating a graphic that simply referenced death. I wanted to physically build the idea and put myself inside the world of the name.

Building the Release

Once those eight months were over, I quit the field job and committed myself fully to TDOM.

I embroidered my first collection myself: black-and-red cross-logo hoodies and embroidered hats.

Then I started building the world around them.

I dug the grave.

I transformed what is now my studio—but at the time was still my barbershop—by filling the space with 100 red candles.

I hired a photographer from my city.

And I went all in on presenting the collection like something that mattered.

The clothing, grave, candle-filled room, photography, and environment were all parts of the same idea.

I even hosted a party to celebrate the completion of the project.

For my first collection, I didn’t have a professional production infrastructure or years of experience to lean on. Most of what I had was an idea, the willingness to physically make it happen, and the belief that the presentation deserved as much attention as the clothing.

The Result

The release didn’t perform the way I thought it would.

Sales weren’t what I expected.

The project didn’t become viral.

At the time, I wanted a much bigger reaction.

Instead, one of the most valuable things the project gave me was a lesson I needed very early: making something you believe in does not guarantee an immediate response.

Good things take time.

If I wanted TDOM to become something real, I needed patience. I needed to allow the brand to mature gradually. Every collection had to teach me something that I could carry into the next one.

Rather than making me stop, the disappointment lit a fire under me to keep building.

What Stayed

A lot has changed since that first collection.

The productions became bigger.
The concepts became more developed.
The teams grew.
ROJO MUNDO eventually existed.
The work reached audiences I couldn’t have imagined at the time.

But the reason behind it never really changed.

That first collection established something I still try to protect in every project:

Go all in. Give the idea everything you have.

That is what The Death Of Me has always meant to me.

Looking for the Character

For most of my life, I wanted to be seen as a creative.

I knew I wanted to make something bigger than myself, but for years I didn’t have an identity that fully reflected what I felt internally.

I tried things. I experimented. Some ideas worked and others didn’t. A lot of them simply never felt completely like me.

Looking back, it almost feels like being ROJO was already somewhere inside me. I just needed years of trial and error before I was ready to find it.

I think about life like a video game.

Sometimes you know there is another character waiting somewhere in the game, but you haven’t completed enough of the story to unlock them yet.

That is what painting myself red eventually felt like.

I didn’t invent the character that day. I felt like I had finally earned the right to unlock him.

Diablo

I grew up listening to Mac Miller.

“Diablo” was one of those songs I had always loved. I danced to it long before this project existed, so when I was developing the ROJO HAT 2.0 rollout, using the song felt completely natural.

I used myself as the reference for the project.

I recorded a dance performance to promote the red hat and used “Diablo” to express the energy I wanted around it.

There wasn’t some complicated strategy behind the decision.

At that stage of my creative life, I rarely planned concepts very far ahead.

I followed my gut.

Intuition First

That instinct had been developing long before this project.

Growing up, I hated being told what to do. I made a lot of my own decisions from an early age, and as I got older I realized that gave me a strong internal compass.

There weren’t many outside voices living in my subconscious telling me which direction I was supposed to go creatively.

So when painting myself red started feeling like the obvious next step, I didn’t spend weeks questioning it.

I did it.

That has become one of the clearest ways I understand my own process:

I connect the dots backward, not forward.

I usually don’t make something because I already understand exactly where it will lead.

I follow the idea that feels right, and later I can look backward and understand why I needed to make it.

The First Red

When I finally painted my entire body red, something clicked immediately.

For years I had wanted to push myself creatively and find an identity that actually felt like mine.

Then suddenly I could see it.

The red hat, the music, the dance, the performance, the body paint—it felt like a culmination of different pieces of myself arriving in the same place.

It almost felt like the stars aligned.

The character I had been searching for was standing in front of me.

And once I saw him, I knew I had started something.

I was bound to eventually strike gold. Or in this case, strike ROJO.

It Didn’t Go Viral

Ironically, the first red concept did not explode online.

And looking back, I’m glad it didn’t.

I didn’t want painting myself red to become a one-time gimmick that people noticed for a week and forgot about.

I had just unlocked something that felt important to me.

Now I needed to understand it.

I needed to nurture it.

I needed to refine it.

I needed to give the character enough time to become more than the visual shock of seeing someone painted red.

A Mundo Doesn’t Grow Overnight

I knew this was the beginning of something larger, but I also understood that a world couldn’t appear fully formed from one video.

A mundo doesn’t grow overnight.

So I kept painting myself red.

I kept experimenting with what the character could represent.

I kept making concepts, clothing, imagery, videos, and experiences around it.

And slowly, the audience began understanding what I had seen in that first moment.

Over the years, people started calling me the Red Guy themselves.

It happened online.

Then it started happening in public.

People would recognize me because of the character I had continued developing.

The identity became recognizable through repetition—not because one video instantly went viral, but because I stayed committed to the idea long enough for it to grow.

What This Project Unlocked

ROJO HAT 2.0 began as a product concept.

What came out of it was much larger.

Painting myself red gave me a visual identity that finally felt aligned with the creative person I had been trying to express for years.

I didn’t understand everything it would become on May 13, 2021.

I only knew that it felt right.

That instinct would lead to roughly five years of continuously painting myself red and eventually to a much larger creative world:

ROJO MUNDO.

A Love Letter to Myself

CARINO CAPSULE was made during one of the worst periods of my life.

I had just come out of a relationship and I was losing motivation.

Looking back, it is still strange to me that something I think is so beautiful came out of a period where I felt so low.

In a lot of ways, the project became a love letter to myself.

Instead of separating what I was feeling from the work, I put it directly into the art.

The collection consisted of two pieces:

Vino Sweater — wine-colored.
Lila Sweater — lilac.

I have always used my collections as a way to pay homage to my Mexican culture, and using Spanish names has been part of that language from the beginning.

Carino is a term of endearment.

For a collection being created in the middle of heartbreak, that felt right.

The Song

This project was also the beginning of something else for me:

my fan-made music videos.

The first artist I chose was Depresión Sonora.

His music had helped me through some dark periods, and using “Como Todo El Mundo” became my way of paying homage to something that had genuinely meant something to me.

During the breakup, I would listen to the song constantly.

Eventually I stopped only hearing it.

I started seeing it.

The visual became something I would daydream about over and over.

I could see myself red.

I could see the clothing.

I could feel the environment.

I didn’t have a mood board.

I didn’t have a production deck.

I just had a feeling that I knew I needed to make real.

So I texted my friend @cmpsmnd and told him the idea.

He was fully on board.

Unlocking the Location

One day I was driving on the outskirts of Fresno when I came across a green field.

I stopped the car.

I put on my headphones.

I played “Como Todo El Mundo.”

Then I physically reenacted the visions I had been seeing in my head.

Immediately, I knew.

This was the location.

I think about life like a video game, and moments like that always feel significant to me.

Whenever reality suddenly gives me the exact thing I have been imagining, I make a mental note:

I just unlocked a new level.

I didn’t scout ten locations.

I didn’t build a complicated plan.

I stumbled onto the right place, trusted what I felt, and remembered it.

Two People and an Idea

We began shooting early on a Saturday.

I painted myself red beforehand and met @cmpsmnd at the field.

The production was literally just the two of us.

I was performing in the Vino Sweater and Lila Sweater.

@cmpsmnd was behind the camera.

That was it.

No large crew.

No elaborate production infrastructure.

Just two people with a dream and an idea trying to make the thing we could see in our heads.

And then it started raining.

The Rain

It wasn’t a light drizzle.

It started pouring.

We could have stopped.

From a practical standpoint, it would have made sense. We had to worry about the camera, and the conditions were getting worse.

But emotionally, the rain made the concept feel even more correct.

Instead of fighting it, we leaned into it.

The weather gave the project something we could never have planned.

Because of the camera-safety risk, we suddenly had a very small window to work.

We shot the entire visual in a little under 30 minutes.

That constraint forced us to trust the idea and move.

There was no time to overthink it.

Finding the Emotion in the Edit

Filming quickly was only the first challenge.

The edit became the harder part.

The goal was not simply to assemble the best-looking shots.

The video had to feel the way the song and that period of my life felt to me.

@cmpsmnd sent me the first version.

It was good.

But I knew it wasn’t there yet.

So we kept working.

We got on FaceTime and went back through it together.

We refined the timing.

We refined the choices.

We kept trying to pull the right emotion out of the footage.

Three versions later, something finally clicked.

We both knew it.

We had struck gold.

The Result

When we released the finished video, people responded to it.

The piece has since reached more than 361,000 views.

But what matters to me about the project goes beyond the number.

We had no big crew.

No elaborate pre-production system.

No perfect weather forecast.

No guarantee that the idea would work.

We found the location by instinct.

We kept shooting when the rain came.

We worked within a 30-minute window.

And when the first edit didn’t communicate what I needed it to communicate, we kept refining it until it did.

The response came after the creative decisions.

A Rebirth

CARINO CAPSULE feels like a rebirth when I look back at it.

Painting myself red had already unlocked the character.

This project helped me start understanding the world around that character.

The ROJO MUNDO language still wasn’t fully formed, but it was becoming more intentional.

Music, clothing, environment, emotion, performance, weather, and color were beginning to work together instead of existing as separate pieces.

And personally, the project reminded me that even during one of the lowest periods of my life, I could still make something beautiful.

That became another lesson I would carry forward:

sometimes the work does more than communicate what I am feeling.

Sometimes making it helps me move through what I am feeling.

Taking the Brand to New York

This was only my second time really being in New York.

The first trip had been something I did alone and wasn’t especially work-focused.

This time was completely different.

I traveled from LAX to New York with my team during Fashion Week. There were five of us including me, and we stayed in the city for more than a week.

We already had the campaign planned.

A Brooklyn studio was booked.

The black puffer was ready.

And for the first time, I was preparing to direct a TDOM campaign where someone other than me would be the model.

That felt significant.

Up until then, I had mostly been the person wearing the clothing, painting myself red, and physically embodying the world I was building.

Now I wanted to see what happened when someone else entered it.

Casting Kai

A few weeks before the trip, I had briefly talked with @kaimillerx through DMs.

I asked if she would be interested in being painted red and modeling for the next TDOM drop.

She said yes.

I was genuinely excited to book her because this was new territory for the brand.

She wasn’t being brought in simply to wear a jacket.

I wanted to bring her into ROJO MUNDO.

That shoot would also become the first time we met in person, and she would eventually become a close friend.

The Unexpected Casting

While we were in New York, I was watching @trevorspitta on Instagram.

He was one of my favorite rappers at the time—and I mean genuinely one of my favorites. My Apple Music Replay had him as my most-listened-to artist.

My friends had gotten into his music too, so when we saw that he was performing at a club in the city, all of us were excited to go.

I met him there.

He was incredibly cool and easy to talk to.

Later that night, I stepped outside because I don’t drink and wanted to go next door for a Red Bull to stay awake.

Trevor saw me leaving and caught up with me outside.

I explained that I wasn’t going home—I was literally just getting a Red Bull.

We ended up talking.

Eventually the conversation moved toward TDOM and the photoshoot we had scheduled two days later.

My photographer was there and basically gave me the push.

Why not ask him?

It felt like a Hail Mary.

I fully expected him to say no, and I would have understood if he did.

Instead, he said yes.

Two Days Later

Two days later, Trevor showed up to the studio.

That part was surreal.

Someone whose music I had been listening to constantly was suddenly participating in a world I had built myself.

Now the campaign had two models:

@kaimillerx
@trevorspitta

Both painted red.

Both wearing the black puffer.

The first people other than me to model for TDOM were people I genuinely respected creatively.

We were playing Trevor’s music during the shoot while I was directing him inside my own campaign.

That was one of those moments where I had to recognize how far the work had already taken me.

A Different Kind of Production

The studio itself was also a step forward for me.

We rented a professional space in Brooklyn for a few hours.

It had a makeup station.

A dressing room.

A waiting room.

And a large curved cyc wall for photography.

At that point, that kind of production environment was much more polished than what I was accustomed to.

It felt decked out.

Honestly, it felt bougie.

But once we were inside it, the goal wasn’t to fill the room with unnecessary ideas.

I wanted to keep the visual direction extremely simple.

Entering Rojo Mundo

Kai and Trevor were both painted completely red.

I painted myself red too because that was simply who I was at that point, but I stayed primarily behind the scenes directing the campaign.

I wanted the models to feel almost like video-game characters who had entered ROJO MUNDO.

Cool.

Controlled.

Simple.

The background stayed white.

The poses remained clean.

Facial expressions were limited.

There wasn’t a complicated narrative to perform.

The black clothing against the red bodies already created the visual tension I needed.

And both Kai and Trevor already had enough presence on their own.

I didn’t need them pretending to be somebody else.

I wanted them to be themselves—just inside my world.

Knowing When to Stop

This project also taught me something about restraint.

Creative direction doesn’t always mean adding another prop, another set piece, another storyline, or another effect.

Sometimes the strongest decision is recognizing what is already working.

We had:

the red bodies.
the black puffer.
the white studio.
two strong personalities.

That was enough.

I wanted the red and the clothing to speak for themselves.

The models didn’t need to overperform.

Their presence was the concept.

Expanding the World

What stays with me most about this project is that ROJO MUNDO stopped belonging only to my own body.

For years, I had been the main person carrying the visual identity.

I was the Red Guy.

I wore the clothes.

I painted myself.

I performed.

In this studio, I was still red—but I was standing behind the camera and helping other people exist inside the world.

That was a different feeling.

It showed me that the identity I had been developing could extend beyond me without losing what made it recognizable.

And having the first two people to do that be Kai and Trevor made the moment even more special.

One casting decision was planned weeks ahead.

The other came from a completely unexpected conversation in New York.

Both ended up in the same room.

Sometimes creative direction is building the plan.

Sometimes it is recognizing the opportunity that appears while you are already executing it.

This project required both.

When the First Idea Failed

Near the end of February, @alfayoumii reached out to me.

He was finishing NYU for film and wanted to use that moment to help bring an artist’s concept to life.

He chose me.

I felt honored.

The minute I agreed, we started working.

The original production became serious quickly. We wrote a complete script with dialogue. We had a cast. Props were being prepared. We released a casting call.

The concept depended on a very specific type of location.

And we couldn’t find it.

As my arrival date got closer, eventually we had to accept that the production we had spent weeks developing wasn’t going to happen.

I’m intentionally keeping that original concept private because I still want to make it one day.

But at the time, losing it felt brutal.

Accept and Adapt

For days I couldn’t think of anything.

I was trying so hard to replace the original concept that I was making it harder for myself to create.

I almost called @alfayoumii and asked if we could push the entire shoot.

That experience taught me something I still carry into my work:

Ideas come and go. Accept and adapt.

Creative direction requires caring deeply about an idea without becoming so attached to it that you can’t recognize when circumstances have changed.

Eventually I stopped forcing the answer.

After the gym one day, I went home and started watching scenes from movies I loved on YouTube.

No strategy.

No brainstorming document.

I just wanted to enjoy something.

About an hour later, I came across The Sixth Sense.

The kid says:

“I see dead people.”

And immediately something clicked.

What if I said: “I see red people”?

The New Idea

The second I thought of it, the direction became obvious.

Instead of trying to rebuild the production we had lost, we would make something completely new:

a suspenseful movie trailer where the fear wasn’t seeing dead people.

It was seeing red people.

I called @alfayoumii.

Almost immediately, he understood exactly where I wanted to take it.

We rebuilt the concept.

We wrote a completely new script.

And we did it in less than a week.

A few days later, we were filming.

The Production

The shoot became a four-day production across New York City.

There were 15+ people working together.

We had a producer.

A videographer.

Assistants.

Casting support.

Production coordination.

Catering.

And more than 13 performers painted completely red.

There was enough infrastructure around us that @alfayoumii and I didn’t have to personally carry every single production responsibility at once.

That allowed us to actually direct.

And at the same time, there was still room for spontaneous ideas to happen while we were filming.

When the Dream Became Physical

This was one of the first moments where I looked around and realized:

this is real now.

ROJO MUNDO had started with me painting myself red by myself.

Now I was standing in New York City surrounded by more than 13 red-painted people performing inside something I had helped conceive, write, produce, and direct.

That hit me hard.

These weren’t imaginary characters anymore.

The world had people inside it.

A lot of the people involved eventually became my friends.

And for those four days, it honestly felt less like work and more like being a kid again—running around New York making something with my friends.

Using New York as the Set

Once the original location-dependent concept disappeared, the city itself became part of the solution.

We moved through multiple locations.

We filmed around New York.

We traveled from train to train while painted red.

There were constantly things going wrong and then somehow turning into something better.

People saw us everywhere.

And instead of the city rejecting how strange the whole thing looked, it felt like New York welcomed us.

For a few days, we left our own little red mark across the city.

The Final Day

The last day is something I still think about.

We spent the day moving from train to train and filming at different locations.

By the end of production, we somehow ended up on a rooftop balcony.

After four days of running around New York, adapting, filming, painting people red, solving problems, and building this thing together, suddenly we were standing above the city.

It felt like the ending of a movie.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recreate that exact feeling.

That won’t stop me from trying.

What I Learned

“I See Red People” began with a failed production.

That is one of the reasons I’m so proud of it.

If I had stayed emotionally attached to the original idea, none of this would exist.

The project taught me that creative direction is not protecting an idea at all costs.

It is protecting the purpose of the work, even when the route toward it changes completely.

We lost the location.

We lost the original concept.

We rebuilt the script in under a week.

Then we coordinated more than 15 collaborators and 13+ red-painted performers across four days in New York City.

What initially felt like a creative failure became one of the experiences that made me feel most certain that the world I had been imagining could actually exist.

Accept and adapt.

Why Is Everything Rojo?

There is a question underneath a lot of my work:

Why is everything rojo?

For EL PASADO COLLECTION, the answer started with childhood.

The idea behind the project was:

The pasado determines the future.

I wanted to go backward and look at the things that formed me before I knew what creative direction was, before TDOM existed, and before I had any idea where my life was going.

Those memories would become the foundation for something new.

The Idea I Couldn’t Keep Waiting On

I had carried the idea for this set for years.

It was one of those concepts that stayed in the back of my mind because I knew how difficult it would be to actually execute.

Eventually I reached a point where I had to be honest with myself:

If I don’t do this now, I might never have another opportunity to go this hard.

The project was too personal to keep postponing.

So I called my friends.

I explained the vision.

And somehow, they believed in the crazy idea enough to help me make it real.

Five Shirts, One World

EL PASADO COLLECTION consisted of five T-shirts in different colors.

But I didn’t want the campaign to stop at showing five shirts.

The clothing needed to exist inside a world that explained where the idea came from.

When I thought about childhood, I didn’t remember it as something dull or distant.

In my head, childhood was shiny and futuristic.

Technology felt exciting.

Games felt enormous.

Toys felt important.

Everything felt like it contained another world.

So I decided to build the way that memory felt rather than trying to recreate my childhood literally.

Building the Past

The goal sounded simple when I explained it:

Cover the entire backyard patio in aluminum foil.

Every inch.

The floor.

The walls.

The ceiling.

Once we started, it became obvious how insane that actually was.

The patio was large, and the environment needed to stop reading like a backyard entirely.

For four to six days, my friends and I worked on transforming it.

Countless hours went into the build.

More than 10 people helped make it possible.

And while the physical set was being constructed, @cmpsmnd and I were simultaneously figuring out how we were going to shoot the music video inside it.

There wasn’t a clean separation between pre-production and production.

Everything was happening at once.

We were building the world while also figuring out how the camera would move through it.

What My Childhood Looked Like in My Head

Once the aluminum environment existed, I started filling it with pieces of the past.

An old-school television.

A PlayStation 2.

Toys.

And more than 3,000 Yu-Gi-Oh cards scattered across the floor.

These weren’t random nostalgic props.

They represented the world I grew up around.

But putting them inside an entirely metallic environment changed them.

It wasn’t meant to look exactly like my childhood bedroom.

It was closer to what childhood felt like in my imagination.

Bright.

Shiny.

Futuristic.

Almost unreal.

It became a memory reconstructed through ROJO MUNDO.

Hometown Cast

I wanted the people inside the video to come from the same place that shaped me.

So I cast my friends from my hometown.

Once I had everyone’s schedules, it became another production problem to solve: coordinating the people, finishing construction, developing the shots, and making sure we could actually bring everyone together at the right time.

The same friends who had listened to me describe the idea were now helping build the environment and eventually standing inside it.

That community is a huge part of why the project exists at all.

The Build and the Video

Construction took approximately four to six days.

During those days, @cmpsmnd and I continued developing the scenes and shots.

Then we finished the set.

And the very next day, we filmed the entire music video.

There wasn’t a long break to recover.

We went directly from construction into production.

I had originated the concept, helped build the set, coordinated the cast, produced the project, and then stepped into the center of the world as the performer.

@cmpsmnd filmed, edited, and collaborated with me on developing the shots.

Looking back, I honestly don’t know how we pulled it off.

At the time, I was still working at the mall.

This wasn’t being built with some giant production budget or company infrastructure behind us.

It was a group of friends in Fresno deciding that this ridiculous idea deserved to exist.

So we made it exist.

The Breakthrough

When we released the video, something changed.

It passed 1 million views within a couple of days.

I had experienced successful content before, but this felt different.

For years I had been trying to communicate a world that made complete sense inside my head.

I had painted myself red.

I had experimented.

I had refined the visual language.

I had kept building even when people didn’t completely understand what I was doing.

With EL PASADO COLLECTION, it finally felt like the audience caught up.

People understood the world I had been trying to build for years.

That changed my life.

Not simply because the number was big.

Because the response validated the years I had spent developing something that couldn’t be explained in one post.

The People Behind the World

I don’t look back at this project and only think about myself.

I think about my friends.

More than 10 people gave their time and energy to an idea that probably sounded ridiculous when I first described it.

They helped cover an entire patio in foil.

They helped build the environment.

They showed up when it was time to film.

They trusted me enough to let me lead them somewhere that didn’t completely exist yet.

EL PASADO COLLECTION would not have happened without that trust.

And one of the most meaningful things about what happened later is knowing that the idea eventually traveled much farther than that backyard—but it began with my friends believing in it first.

The Idea

ROJO ROOM started with me watching Boiler Room sets on YouTube.

I loved how uncomplicated they felt.

A DJ.

A room full of people.

Music.

Energy.

Everyone packed together and actually enjoying themselves.

I immediately started thinking about what that could look like inside ROJO MUNDO.

I knew from the beginning that if I did my version of it, it couldn’t feel small.

It had to be a room full of red people.

It had to happen in New York.

And I wanted it to feel like a real gathering instead of a staged imitation of one.

This was going to be the biggest production I had ever attempted.

But what scared me more than the size of the production was the possibility of having an idea this ambitious and never following through with it.

So I decided:

Go big or go home.

If I could pull this off, I knew it would change how confidently I approached every production after it.

Bringing the World Together

There was another reason I wanted ROJO ROOM to happen.

By this point, I had met so many people through the different projects that had helped ROJO MUNDO grow.

Friends from home.

People I had worked with in California.

People I had met during previous New York productions.

Collaborators from I See Red People.

Creative people who had believed in what I was building.

I wanted to bring those worlds together.

ROJO ROOM felt like an opportunity for everyone to exist in the same place at the same time.

And doing it around the beginning of New York Fashion Week made the timing feel even better.

Four Months of Preparation

@alfayoumii and I started planning roughly four months before the trip.

We put out a casting call and together cast more than 30 people.

Once people started confirming, I created a documented roster with their information so the production didn’t exist as a loose collection of DMs and names in my phone.

I needed to know who was coming.

Who needed what.

How we were communicating with everyone.

And then came another question:

How do you paint more than 30 people red?

I started calculating how much red paint we would need.

How many brushes.

What supplies.

What accessories.

What the makeup area would require.

The visual idea might have been simple, but executing it at that scale required me to think about details I had never needed to think about when I was only painting myself.

The California Team

At the same time, I started asking my friends back home if they wanted to come to New York.

I gave them roughly four months of notice.

They were down.

My traveling team became 11 people.

@alfayoumii had an 11-person New York-side team ready as well.

Some of the people who had been part of I See Red People were coming back for this project too.

That was important to me.

ROJO MUNDO was starting to have continuity.

These weren’t always completely new people entering for one project and disappearing.

Relationships were forming.

People were coming back.

Getting 11 People Across the Country

Having an idea is one thing.

Getting 11 people from California to New York is another.

We kept everyone connected through a group chat while we searched for flights.

Eventually we found tickets from LAX to JFK that worked for an eight-day trip.

Once the flights were handled, we had to solve lodging.

That ended up being harder than I expected.

New York is not exactly designed for a group of more than 10 people trying to stay together comfortably.

I didn’t want everyone packed into a tiny space or sharing beds just because we were trying to save money.

Eventually I found a two-story place large enough for everyone.

Nobody had to share a bed.

That might sound like a small production detail, but to me it mattered.

If I’m asking people to travel across the country and help bring one of my ideas to life, I want them taken care of.

Everyone Needs a Role

The bigger the team became, the more obvious it was that I couldn’t personally communicate every detail to every person while also trying to direct the project.

So I started assigning responsibilities.

I created documents explaining the game plan.

We went over people’s roles before the shoot.

We rehearsed responsibilities so that nobody would arrive at the venue wondering what they were supposed to be doing.

And I made one decision that became especially important:

I handed the operational cast communication to my assistant, Andres.

That allowed him to focus on keeping people informed while I protected my attention for the actual creative direction.

Learning to delegate was important.

Doing everything yourself can feel like control.

But at a certain scale, trying to personally control everything becomes the thing that prevents you from directing well.

Finding the Room

Next came the venue.

I found a billiard hall in Harlem.

It immediately made sense.

I didn’t want ROJO ROOM to feel like 30 people had been placed inside a sterile studio and told to pretend they were at a party.

The billiard hall already had social energy built into it.

It was somewhere people could naturally stand around, move, talk, play, dance, and exist together.

We booked the venue for six hours.

Now the idea finally had a room.

Taking Care of the Details

Once the flights, lodging, cast, teams, roles, and venue were handled, I moved into the remaining logistics.

Food.

Drinks.

Wardrobe.

Photography.

Video.

Marketing.

I found a pizza place and ordered enough food and beverages for everybody involved.

I reached out to photographer and videographer friends and gave them an open invitation to come document what we were building.

My stylist was responsible for making sure everyone was wearing TDOM clothing that I had produced back home.

By the time production day arrived, there were very few questions left unanswered.

That was intentional.

The First Three Hours

We only had the billiard hall for six hours.

Approximately the first half of that time was preparation.

Lighting had to be established.

We created a working area for the makeup artists.

Wardrobe had to be coordinated.

Everyone had to get dressed in TDOM.

And then came the biggest task:

painting more than 30 people red.

That took the longest.

I was painted red too, but I wasn’t there primarily to be the subject.

I was working.

Once production began, @alfayoumii started directing while I worked alongside my makeup-artist friends to get the cast painted and ready.

Slowly the room transformed.

One red person became ten.

Ten became twenty.

Then suddenly there was an entire billiard hall full of people inside ROJO MUNDO.

@00jordie

Once everyone was ready, the actual concept became incredibly simple.

Our friend @00jordie would DJ.

Everyone else would party.

That was basically it.

After spending months coordinating one of the most complicated productions I had ever organized, I didn’t want the final piece to feel complicated.

I didn’t want 30 people constantly waiting for me to tell them where to put their hands or how to move.

I wanted them to have fun.

I wanted @00jordie to play music.

I wanted people wearing TDOM, painted completely red, hanging out in a billiard hall like this was simply a normal room in their world.

And I wanted us to document it.

Build the World, Then Let It Live

That became one of the things I liked most about ROJO ROOM.

A lot of creative direction went into everything the camera didn’t directly show.

The spreadsheets.

The flights.

The house.

The cast roster.

The paint calculations.

The brushes.

The catering.

The wardrobe production.

The assigned roles.

The rehearsed responsibilities.

The communication structure.

The venue booking.

All of that work existed so that when the cameras finally started rolling, the people inside the room didn’t have to feel that complexity.

They could just have fun.

The environment was already doing the work.

We built the conditions for something organic to happen instead of trying to manufacture organic energy after the fact.

Preparation Created Freedom

One of the biggest things I remember about the day is what didn’t happen.

There wasn’t some huge disaster.

There wasn’t mass confusion.

We didn’t burn half the venue time trying to figure out responsibilities we should have established beforehand.

For a production this large, that felt like an accomplishment by itself.

We had over-prepared.

And because we had over-prepared, we could actually enjoy what we had created.

That taught me something I still carry into larger productions:

Preparation creates freedom.

The more questions you answer before production begins, the more room you have to actually be creative when you’re inside it.

My Biggest Production Yet

I had never organized anything at this scale before.

More than 30 cast members.

An 11-person team traveling from California.

An 11-person New York-side team.

Flights.

Lodging.

Wardrobe.

Paint.

Makeup.

Food.

A six-hour venue.

A live DJ.

Photographers.

Videographers.

Dozens of different personalities and schedules.

For years, ROJO MUNDO had been getting larger project by project.

But ROJO ROOM was the first time I really felt what it meant to operate that world at this scale.

And pulling it off changed my confidence.

I had taken an idea that initially felt almost too big and turned it into an actual room full of people.

Now when I thought about future concepts, the question wasn’t as much:

Can I handle something this large?

I had already proven to myself that I could.

What I Would Do Differently

The production went well.

But afterward, I immediately saw something I could have done better.

We had spent months bringing together the cast, wardrobe, venue, production team, lighting, cameras, and all of the infrastructure required to create ROJO ROOM.

And once everyone was finally there, we focused primarily on the hero video.

Looking back, there were so many additional concepts and smaller pieces of content I could have captured while everything was already assembled.

That became another production lesson for me:

When you’re investing that much effort into building a world, think beyond the hero piece.

The main idea should always come first.

But if the production allows it, there should also be a plan for how to maximize the rare moment when every creative resource is already in the same room.

That lesson changed the way I think about content planning for larger productions.

The Room Was the Result

ROJO ROOM started because I loved watching Boiler Room sets.

But the finished project wasn’t about recreating Boiler Room.

It was about seeing how far I could push my own world.

Years earlier, ROJO MUNDO had started with me painting myself red.

Now I was standing inside a Harlem billiard hall surrounded by more than 30 red-painted people wearing clothing I had produced, with friends from California and New York working together to make the room function.

Some of those people had been there for earlier projects.

Some were entering the world for the first time.

All of them were helping make something that had once existed only inside my head physically real.

I wanted everyone I had crossed paths with during this journey to come together.

For six hours in New York, they did.

And after months of preparation, the final direction was simple:

Play the music.
Let everybody have fun.
Document the world we built.