Michael Newman, VP of Technology at Pomp Productions, was invited to speak at the TEDxUCLA 2011 event about his project "Making things" which was inspired by a trip to Maker Faire and mind controlled Nerf guns. He built a special project using Arduino, a Nerf Gun and Twilio that resulted in an extraordinary display titled "Sketches of a Tangent Gone Awry". The project involved balloons, audience location mapping, and a fully automatic computer Nerf Machine Gun built on several programming languages including C, PHP, MySQL, Javascript/jQuery, and a custom circuit board. This project showcased Newman's creativity and technical skills in combining different technologies to create an innovative display.