Drones, Guns, and Zombies: Interview with Marque Cornblatt of “Guns & Gardens”
OutdoorHub Reporters 08.08.13
It’s hard to pigeon-hole Marque Cornblatt. Part high-tech survival guru and zombie-hunter, Marque also is skilled at DIY designs, filmmaking, robot construction, and even aerial combat with homemade drones. We’re not sure whether he’s more valuable cobbling together makeshift technologies after the collapse of society or benefiting mankind with his unique inventions in a lab somewhere. Whatever the case, Marque has earned a following after creating shows such as Guns & Gardens, Gomi Style, and Game of Drones on his YouTube channel. Marque blends tongue-in-cheek humor with educational, even insightful knowledge of his craft.
We were able to sit down with Marque and get to know the tireless tinkerer a little better.
What inspired you to start filming your mechanical or survival-based misadventures?
My original background, my undergraduate degree rather, is in film production from New York University. So for years I’ve been working as a filmmaker and visual artist. When YouTube became a thing several years ago it was a natural place for me to develop an audience. I was one of the early pioneers on the internet making use of those new technologies, seeing if I could use them to help me with creating and sharing a work. I’m very much focused on technology as a subject. I do a lot of robotics and a lot of electronic web-based telepresence chat things. I was doing this before web-based technologies took such precedence. Now my robots are based entirely on web protocols and internet technologies, which allows me to share them with my audience.
A video of Marque and his team assembling a tiny combat drone:
You’re the kind of person to have multiple projects going on at the same time, what was your experience filming these like?
My projects are constantly developing. For a good two to three years my main brand on YouTube was Guns & Gardens, a DIY survival, off-grids living kind of show. What made it unique was that it was placed in a zombie apocalypse. It was like any other survival show where we spoke directly to the camera, only with zombies around us. It was a tongue-in-cheek show that while it had zombies, also offered important survival information. Because Guns & Gardens appealed to both zombie fans and the survival-minded and outdoors types, it easily became the biggest source for my fan base.
DIY survival weapons:
One of the things I found, to my surprise, was that my audience wanted to talk about zombies a lot and I got into really deep conversations about these fictional monsters. In reality, the zombies were just a generic doomsday scenario so we could talk about the survival tips and techniques on our show. That’s when I started on Doomsday Design, so we could shift away from the zombies.
When I put together the sizzle reel for Doomsday Design we were immediately scouted by television producers who were looking to take a crew and myself to produce a TV show. In the back of my mind this has always been one of my goals and I recognized that YouTube would be a way to connect with the TV industry.
Further back, another one of my brands called Gomi Style got picked up for development by Discovery Channel. Gomi Style was a sort of off-grid, DIY dumpster-diving kind of show. This was about six years ago and it went through the development process but like a lot of television shows it never made it to air. When Gomi Style didn’t happen I started doing zombie-themed projects. Currently we’re doing things with the drone show. As we put videos out highlighting some of these drones fighting, or some of the games we do and DIY techniques we use to build these vehicles, out of the woodwork comes the idea that we can frame a show around them.
A trailer for Doomsday Design can be seen below:
Most survival shows involve low-tech, even primitive tools and strategies but yours is remarkably high-tech. Can you explain why?
As I’ve been working on different topics I’ve found that low technology is always good for survival. You can work with literally nothing but the dirt you’re sitting on. At the same time, most survival situations aren’t exactly hard “90 percent difficulty levels.” A lot of times you have things to work with. In my everyday survival pack I don’t carry an exotic firestarter, I carry a Bic lighter. If I encounter the kind of disaster scenario that would render my Bic useless, then I have more primitive supplies. Otherwise if you’re waiting on the side of the road or something, a lighter will do fine. There’s uses for high-tech and low-tech equipment. Especially in the last few years with all these new tools, smaller computers, and advanced technologies such as drones, you might find yourself having enough resources to forego low-tech tools.
If nothing else, a Bic lighter will give you six months to learn how to build a fire, which you better know by that time.
Island survival in the zombie apocalypse:
What other projects are you working on?
We actually put out products from our shows that were originally tongue-in-cheek mock commercials. People actually started wanting to buy those things, so we started selling them. One of them, the Gun Snuggler, which we did as a parody of the Snuggie, first appeared on one of the episodes of Guns & Gardens as a joke. It was so popular and gained so much attention that we decided to go forward and make it. Furthermore we discovered that the makers of the Snuggie knew about it and were okay with the idea.
The Gun Snuggler mock commercial can be seen here:
What is next for your Youtube channel?
A serious, deep torture test of what we call the “unbreakable drone” design. We put it together ourselves (with an armored Kydex shell). To be honest with you I’ve been playing with this prototype drone for about four months and I like crashing more than landing. This drone is still standing tough. Sure there’s been a few tears but the thing just won’t seem to die. In our next video we will be doing a high level torture test. We’re going to fly it into fire and fly it into the hardest surfaces we can find. We’ll go out and drop it from 300-400 feet. We’ve dropped it from about 60 feet before but now we’ll take it to its limits. We’re pretty confident it’ll survive. If it does we’ll take a shotgun to it and see how it fares.
Not everything we do is violent and deadly, right now our other drone project is a search-and-rescue drone. It has a number of different functions so we’re staggering its development. First thing we’re doing is putting a wireless loudspeaker, like a megaphone, up on the sky where you need it. It can communicate to large crowds say at a riot or event, to find lost hikers, or even to warn surfers of shark danger.
How Marque and his crew built their drone:
We’d like to thank Marque for giving us the time to interview him and you can find more of his videos on his YouTube channel. Marque also provides a zombie survival app for the iPhone, which can be found here.
Editor’s note: This interview is part of a series with OutdoorHub’s featured video partners. Click here to read our interview with kayak angler Isaac Brumaghim, and click here to read our interview with firearm guru Eric Blandford of Iraqveteran8888
