I'd like to thank the Academy...

No great work of art is created in a vacuum, or without oodles of support. For that matter, neither is a small potatoes, pointless and the relatively inconsequential works by many unknown artists, like myself for example. So, I'd like to thank those who have offered me support and encouragement in my many artistic pursuits, the latest of which is my silly little video.

First, to my wife the lovely Ms. K. She is patient and understanding, just nodding her head sweetly and never complaining when I am obsessed on one of my tangents. She also is the person who taught me the fundmentals of working with clay, but refuses to take either credit or blame for the monster she has created. She is cute and smart and I love her and am amazed that she still puts up with me.

Next, oh there are so many people...I'll just name a few: Sam, who got me to writing on the web, a better example of openness acceptance and tolerance would be hard to find. Rachael whose frequent postings are inspiring, and remind me of the need for play, plus she sends the most encouraging of emails; Meg whose daily writing is a great example of just doing it, doing it well, doing it seriously, but not taking yourself too seriously, and how to maintain a smile in the face of all evidence. Also my friend/teacher/role model Catherine, who graciously allowed me to work with her this summer, and constantly reminds us to look at things with fresh eyes, and let everything you make inform everything else; the ceramic icons Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, and Jun Kaneko, who all have inspired several generations of clay artists. We can but dream to be that good. Last but not least is Lisa who interviewed me this summer for her blog, which made me try to get my mind around what and how I do things. (what DO I do, and HOW do I do it? And a more pressing question, WHY?}

Of course, there thousands of others, nameless or not remembered, found by the virtue of WWW surf around. The web, books, videos, magazines...I am an information sponge. If only I could retain more...

So without further adieu, I offer up the feature:
Mark makes clay stuff with audio (about 7 meg, but it should load fairly quickly...)

(Some technical notes so anyone that wants to give me tips on video will know what I'm working with: MiniDV to iMovie, edited, extracted to Quicktime Movie. The big one I did in with manual settings trying to drive the file size down while maintaining audio quality. The small file was done with audio deleted and the default for web viewing. There has got to be a better way but so far i can't figure it out.)
Feedback desired...I'm getting pretty interested in the video on web biz. My goal is to make 3-5 minute shorts, get them compressed and viewable, with decent audio. I don't know if I have to learn something about streaming but from this experiment I suspect I might.

Anyways, that's all the stuff I have for now. I leave everyone with this thought: start messing with video, and you begin to understand why real movies cost $$$$ to make...working with video is a time vacuum!

Hope everyone has a great evening and that all the links work!