Portfolio

Projects

Sound Project part 1
Sound Project part 2

Chroma Key

Guitar cinema-graph

Slow it Down (found footage)

Self Portrait

One on One ( multichannel)

52 Card pick up (60 sec shot)

Waking up Surreal


Wiki Write ups

Rage and Depression (1972) by William Wegman

Merce by Merce(1978), by Nam June Paik

 Men Seeking Women (2007) by Penny Lane

 Cafescape gif (2011) Jackson Finter




-Alex Schwalbe

Tec. Demo

For my demo I went over the steps i took to recreate the MC Escher piece Drawing hands> I demonstrated how to use a green screen mask in Photoshop in Final Cut Pro X. Also I should how I used that mask technique to cover a seem and blend areas of the video together. Basically I went over all the problems i had while editing and how I went about solving them.   

Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons

 Born in Long Island, New York 1949
Lives and works in New York
BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia

lauriesimmons.net

Final Project

For my finale I have the idea of re-creating past work into video that will include  myself. What i mean by that is that i would like to focus around one artist, MC Escher, and create shots to look like his well known artwork. On top of that i plan the images telling a story narrated with a voice over. What I'm going for, is a basic story with all the shots to have MC Escher references so that anyone that knows the works will easily recognize them which is all part of the story. I feel that if done right it will make a great and interesting piece to any fan of Escher's and for those that don know him it will hopefully give a reason for them to look him up.    

The video will be done in a single channel format and will be very difficult to pull off because of the complexity of Escher's work. I will need to match shots from the original works as well as use multiple layers of video in some cases.  

Multi Screen

        I'm having a really hard time coming up with an idea for this project. As of now I'm leaning towards a two channel video side by side with a bit of a gap between the two screens. I want to play with the idea of the gap being there either with animation or live action, i want to have the idea of jumping the gap literally people running from one screen and trying to jump to the next. It may turn into a bit of a narrative with the goal of trying to get over the gap in between the screens. Another small idea i had was to just have people throwing and object back and forth from one screen to another.
       Both ideas are fairly simple which I don't really like, I feel that there is something I'm not thinking of that could be a much more interesting video so I'm still thinking and hopefully come up with something better then these small basic ideas i have right now.

Self Portriat

'Seasons worth thinking about'  Alex Schwalbe


34 sec
Video

Gallery

In the gallery I looked at two pieces on being David Shrigley"s 'New Friends'  (2006, animation, 1 min.) which is an animation about a box that lives in a box world and falls into a hole to meet round friends. what i like about this one was the way he did his animation it was simple and still very understandable and created a very different  feel to it. he even refers to his drawings as a mix between hand writing and drawing.
The other artist I looked at was Andrew Bush 'Women southeast at 64mph on U.S. Route 101 near Santa Barbra at 4:39pm sometime in March 1990' (1990, chronogeneric print) which is exactly what it sounds like a women driving on a freeway in her car but the image isn't blurred its as if he was right next to her and she was stopped.
Both pieces take a simple idea and add to it by altering it just a bit Shrigley could have done a more realistic cartoon and Bush happened to be there at the right moment and decided to shoot it so it looked still getting a completely natural reaction or pose from the women driving. both deal with identity in diffrent ways in one the artist is creating everything about the charters we see including there world. The other has only selection of images we see the artist has no control over the subject and neither does the subject in a sense because she doesn't know she's being photographed.  I just shows a portrait can be all knowing or all unknown.

Listening song

Listing Song (2013)
Alex Schwalbe
Song
38 sec.

A song or beat made up of noises one might here in a hallway.

Slow it down (appropriation)

Slow it Down (2013)
Alex Schwalbe
1:04 min
Video

A video made of found footage, currently in the public domain. The footage is completely reworked to create a new piece.

Gif

Untitled (2013)
Alex Schwalbe
Cinemagraph
Gif

    A moving picture, a still image of myself playing the guitar and every 5 seconds my hand changes position on the fret.

Fair Use

The fair use reading is a topic I have heard many times now its all about appropriation how much of something can you take before its stealing and it seems thee is still no true answer. They say in the reading that in order to use other material for your work you first need permission and need to pay for any source being used. Seems fair but its really not, in my opinion, if not for taking bits of past artists work there would be no new work. All rhythms would be taken and all pictures would be taken. I’m not suggesting that an artist completely steal a picture and then just tint it slightly blue either.

Which brings me to the second article all about an artist taking footage from a war, footage that she did not take herself, and mixing it with images of homes and everyday life by us. Though she took other peoples images and used them for her own work she was creating a completely different idea then the original images. The originals showed a documentation of war or commercials for products here in the states but the way she mixes them makes a strong statement about how we are able to distance ourselves from a war that we are involved in.  As far as the reading goes she got in no trouble for taking and using these images yet Negativland has to tip toe around everyone making sure they have everything in order to just not get sued. 

Listening

At first this assignment was pretty easy, describing a space using just sound. I had no problem listening and finding sounds usually ignored or pushed assisted by louder sounds. I liked the idea of learning about other sounds to put into videos besides just silence I always felt that silence in any sort of movie is only used for a purpose, such as making someone uncomfortable or to add suspense while wait for an answer or whatever the case may be.

The second part of this assignment has been a lot harder then I thought it was going to be. I’m supposed to take the sounds used in the first part and create a song out of them. I am no song writer is what I’m learning with this. I have ideas and when I try them out no matter what I do it just sounds like noise. I have a whole new respect for DJ’s that do this for a living. At first I tried mixing it up in a faster beat like a Fatboy slim song of Skrillex but that didn’t work out so well. I went with what I knew better and my beat turned into a more of a rock based rhythm. Overall I liked the idea of what I was trying but I feel that the outcome for this project might never turn out like I imagine in my head.  

-Alex Schwalbe