A New Composition - Looking Down on Utopia

Here is another song that I recorded using GarageBand.
Looking Down on Utopia

Opening Night

I had worked for weeks and weeks for this night. I had set aside an hour of my time each night to learn my lines and stage directions to be a part of this. I was the secondary lead, the supporting actor, and I was in the dim backstage of the theatre with a lone blue light to aid me with revising my script. I could hear the audience gathering. The rustle of clothing, the creak of the metal folding chairs as the expectant spectators sat down in them, the low and hushed conversations beginning to emerge from the sprinklings of people gathered at the far side of the auditorium. It was half-an-hour until curtain-rise and it felt like I had an assembly of slithery and fluttery creatures amassing in my innards. I needed to deal with this quickly or I would surely faint. I remembered the severe criticism of my director and the gentle reassurances from my family and found a happy average between the two. My breathing slowed, the animals fled, yet there was a swelling uneasiness in my gullet. It was my 7th play with the troupe but I still had trouble controlling my crippling nerves. My older brother told me “Nerves are natural and normal and with public performance comes nerves.” I thought to myself that demonic nerves such as these could not possibly be normal, or how could any production be made at all?

Fifteen minutes to go. The stagehands were rushing around me touching up makeup, tweaking our costumes with such meticulous eyes that I thought quietly to myself that they would panic if they saw the lead actor had a speck of dust on his pristine bow tie. The audience was gathering at an increased rate now, the low hum of conversation had become a mighty roar of laughter and greetings. Our director came backstage to give us last minute ideas and notes. As she spoke the eyes of all the cast lit up with pride and confidence — that is all the cast but me. As I stood there in the dim backstage with my lone blue light I was worried. Worried that I would let everyone down, that I would be the weak link, that I could single handedly destroy all that these people had worked so hard to build. The director said her final words of encouragement and left to climb up the ladder to the light board to begin the show. And as she exited I felt abandoned. I heard the co-director shout “Three minutes until Showtime people! Get Ready!”

The cavalcade of animals in my stomach returned and brought with them many of their friends. I felt sick. I dropped my script and whirled around looking for a chair to sit down on, but I saw none. I closed my eyes and I fell. I waited to feel the hard embrace of the cold stone floor, but to my surprise I waited in vain. I was caught not by any stagehand or director or any other form of authority, but by the lead actor, my partner in crime, my friend. “One minute!” He quietly reinforced the miniscule thought that needed reinforcing most. He told me that I was going to be brilliant, that I was going to steal the show, that I was going to be a star! He did it in a way no-one but a friend could, his compassion could not be matched by any supervisor or teacher. I stood up strongly and without any question in my mind about how the performance was going to go. I was empowered by his words. We walked on stage and to our marks, gave each other a look, and suddenly the curtain went up. It took me a second to register everything, the blinding stage lights, the sea of faces before me. Everything was silent except for a small cough from the audience. I took some deep breaths and opened the show without any fear in my voice. I was strong. I was confident. I was ready.

Recently Remixed & Recorded-Duet

Here is another song that I recorded using GarageBand. I don't know who wrote it, but people have told me they have heard it before. It is a nice, short duet. Due to the fact that my USB keyboard ha s a limited range, I recorded one half of the piece (played by me) and tracklaid the other part (also played by me) on top of it. Enjoy‼ Duet

Recently Remixed - Axel F

One of my friends recently taught me the melody and baseline to Axel F (more commonly known as "Crazy Frog") and I found it so cool, that I decided to orchestrate it using Garageband. I used a M-Audio Keystation 49e (a small electronic piano that plugs into my MacBook) and Garageband to record and mix. It was great fun and I wanted to make more. This then sparked an idea — what if I find all my old composed music, compose more and pool it together on my blog. I will be posting new songs regularly and I will also be posting some of my older songs. Bear in mind that I wrote them when I was much littler so a few of them might sound a bit samey, but I still think they are cool. Anyway, here is my new Axel F homage!

Bee Aware - my film at Camp Cinequest

Cinequest is a film promotion company, who organize the Cinequest film festival in San Jose every year. Camp Cinequest is a summer camp for blooming film students to learn more elaborate film techniques, about the camera and how to use it, and how to edit using Final Cut Pro. Camp Cinequest is held at San Jose University. it is a wonderful location because of the enormous campus and every kind of person you can imagine if you need a quick interview for your film. The people I worked with were film enthusiasts and that was a huge bonus. The mentors offered professional advice and the co-directors worked to the best of their ability. We had 2 teams, my team that worked on a documentary about honey bees and the other team that worked on a narrative (a narrative is a story rather than pure fact). My production team had a total of 4 people - myself, Calliope Scherrer, Peter Savoy and our mentor, Car Nazzal, who had excellent organization skills. Let me just talk about them individually. Peter was the comedian of the group and provided comic relief in a film about dying honey bees. he stars as a honey critic who is trying to sniff out the organic honey in the midst of non-organic honey ¡EEEW! terrible stuff. Calliope represents the average person commenting about the decline of honey bees. She asked questions that the audience might be wondering. If i may quote her "if it doesn't affect me then i don't care". imagine someone with a horsewhip and a British accent sitting in the directors chair and then you will have me! I was also the cameraman, editor-in-chief, boom mic operator ( a boom mic is a large mic attached on the end of a pole) and the narrator. Car was our mentor; she helped us decide on camera angles, provided music and helped with editing. By now you are probably wondering about what my film was about. Bees. To be more precise the huge decline of honey bees. Basically all the non-organic raised honey bees are dying. This doesn't just mean "no more honey". Oh no its much more important that that. It means no more pollinators.
And no more pollinators means no more food! The main reason causing the deaths is that the commercial bee keepers are transporting bees around the country for pollination. To save money the bee keepers feed the bees corn syrup. This compromises the immune system and they really feel the effects of the mites and diseases that were always there. Note that organic beekeepers haven't had any unnatural deaths at all. Thanks to my mum for compiling all the research. What's filmmaking without a little fame? My team got their 15 minutes of fame when our film was chosen to represent the best of Camp Cinequest! We had 2 public showings of our movie, one in San Pedro Square, the other in St. James' Park. The Willow Glen Resident thought it would be good to feature someone who lives in Willow Glen and participated in the camp. Guess where I live?
Here's the movie:

Download the Beaglemania movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.
Or watch it on YouTube

Beaglemania

Fred the guitar playing beagle:

Download the Beaglemania movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.
Or watch it on youtube.

Helmet Surfing - Stop Motion with people

Christopher and I made this movie after seeing Tony vs. Paul:

Download the Helmet Surfing movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

It took about 3 hours to make and 2 hours to edit. I wrote the music in a day and the credits song is the first song I ever wrote.
I hope you enjoy it and find it entertaining.

Christmas rapping

Hannah, Andrew and Christopher (H.A.C. for short) made a Christmas Eve rap.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, music

Christopher's Buttons

This blog is up for voting in the vloggies in the "children's" category - do please vote for us.

This movie is one the boys made about 5 years ago - Christopher invented some magic buttons, and they started working...

Download the Christopher's Buttons movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Technorati Tags: button, magic, marksbrothers, video, vloggies

Robogames report

We went to the robogames today:

Download the Robogames movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Technorati Tags: lego, movie, Robogames, robot, soccer, video

Review of Casablanca's Cafe

0.2

Casablanca's Cafe is extraordinary

Jun 10, 2006 by Andrew Marks business

Casablanca's Café

1185 Lincoln Ave

San José, CA 95125

(408) 993 8636

★★★★☆ Casablanca's Café is an extraordinary Persian restaurant in down town Willow Glen. I had the Hummus sampler and a Gyro Sandwich (lamb, red cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, tzatziki in lavosh bread) which was very nice Although the food is grade-A the actual environment is slightly drab with only four ornamental fish on the wall and two nice paintings that look like a window in a beach hut. What I think made it special is that you can buy assorted Persian delicacies on a shelf near the counter. I strongly recommend Casablanca's Café.

Apple is holding my data hostage

When my boys' videos started getting some interest via their podcast and the Make film festival, I got 2 emails in a row from Apple's mac.com service saying I was exceeding bandwidth limits, and then I was cut off.

Back when I worked for Apple, they launched mac.com as a free service, and I bagged our family names in their namespace. The integration of iDisk into the OS made it a simple way to post files to the web, and I used it for both work-related sample code and personal bits and pieces.

Later on, Apple did a bait and switch, and started charging for mac.com. I decided the cost wasn't too onerous, and we could keep the email addresses and the hosting. It costs $100 a year, and $10 for each extra email address, but the switching cost seemed high, as we have a lot of friends who use those email addresses, and the hosting integreation is handy.

Later on, I kept getting 'your email account is full' crap, and pointed out that gmail offered 100 times as much storage for free, and they later relaxed the terms a bit.

Then came this, from noreply@apple.com:

Dear .Mac Member,

Please be aware that you have reached 100% of your .Mac data transfer quota for this two-week period and we have turned off external access to your site(s). Attempts to visit there will produce a page explaining that your site has gone over data transfer quota and the material requested cannot be displayed.

You can still publish to your site(s), but you will not be able to view any changes on the Internet until your site is reactivated. Reactivation will happen on the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first. To review your data transfer usage, click here. To increase your data transfer quota by purchasing additional storage space, click here.* For more information see Help.

I thought 'OK, I'll move my stuff to other hosting, and redirect my links' - but the iDisk 'Sites' folder is also disabled on my machine, so I can't get at my files to move them.

So, if some of my posts here are missing movies or images, that's why.
Amazon's S3 service is looking interesting, both Google and Microsoft are preparing hosting services, and there are a plethora of video hosting sites like blip.tv.

Apple's terms are uncompetitive, and stopping me from accessing my own files until I pay is a nasty kind of blackmail.

Technorati Tags: Apple, hosting, mac.com, podcasting, politics

Andrew and Christopher won the Make Movie Festival

Andrew and Christopher
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

Bre Pettis writes:

With so many great entries it was hard to pick a winner, but the Marks Brothers' Fun with Dry Ice shined through. Their top notch explanations of how to have fun with dry ice was really great. The grand prize is a box set of Make Magazines signed by the Make Magazine staff, a Make: t-shirt for each brother, and Make: license plate covers, which they'll have to wait until they can drive to use!

The boys, Rosie and I are dead chuffed.

The Magic Hamburger

A magical claymation:

Download the Magic Hamburger movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Fun with Dry Ice

Andrew and Christopher demonstrate fun things to do with dry ice:

Download the Dry Ice movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.