First Year Sound Production Project
The brief for this assignment was to recreate all of the sound in the intro to 'The Big Lebowski'. We were given the video without any sound, in order to record/create the sounds from scratch and edit these together using Pro Tools. This was a group project completed by 4 members.
In researching The Big Lebowski we found that the film was a parody of the film noir genre and this definitely influenced our work. The Coen brothers poked fun at its conventions and tropes - a wise narrator, an anti-hero with a mystery to solve, a plot that becomes denser and more fantastical as it progresses - and this had been established from the very outset.
Sam Elliott’s Western drawl that meanders through a clumsy introduction is the antithesis of the harsh, quick witted narration of the films it parodies, and we wanted to parody that in turn.
With regards to music, we wanted to emulate the mournful jazz sound of film noir. There were plans to use hi hats, cymbals, drums, trumpets, piano, saxophone - a cacophony of classic jazz instruments that would really hammer home the fact that this was a parody. Unfortunately, we weren’t quite able to achieve this with our limited experience with MIDI but the drum track we ended up using was still in keeping with our theme.
In the same vein we used music and sound to clarify the fact that the Dude is the protagonist. At the first introduction of his name, the drums seem to react enthusiastically. When he walks down the supermarket aisle, his footsteps are perhaps more echoey and resounding than they would naturally be, suggesting his great importance as the great detective in the story.
We used the original opening as a guide for most of our interpretation. The way that diegesis was explored particularly influenced us - the fading of music into the background of the supermarket and its abrupt halt as the Dude enters his house mirrors the techniques used in the original. We played with it a bit as well, however, as there’s a hint that the Dude hears the voice over calling him lazy as he looks up, as if affronted.
We focused mainly on diegetic sounds, such as footsteps, keys, wind and tumbleweed. We wanted to add as much diegetic sound in as possible to enforce the realism of the scene and create as much detail as possible. As a result, the majority of our recordings are to do with movement and action in the opening scene, which we feel benefitted our project greatly.
