For my project, I used a scene from the Big Lebowski in which the main characters, the Dude and Walter, are having a conversation about what they think happened to the girl which the Dude has been tasked in finding. In this scene, the two characters are mostly sat still in a bowling alley, whilst a third character mutters and interrupts occasionally. Moreover, near the end of the scene, a different character – Jesus – is introduced, who is standing and wearing a tracksuit. The characters have a small exchange, and the scene ends. In addition, near the start of the scene, there is a flashback to where Jesus is seen in a suburban environment knocking on a door to a big, rough looking man. This scene was particularly interesting to provide Foley to, as will be discussed later.
In regards to the speech, I was unable to find professional voice actors to speak for me, and therefore I utilised a couple of my friends, as well as myself. This led to the issue of voices not particularly matching characters, as well as the delivery of lines to not be as good as I would have wanted. Nevertheless, due to time restrictions, there was nothing I could do about this, and in the future if I were to do ADR again, I would ensure that professional voice actors were used to provide a higher quality end product. In terms of recording, again due to time constraints, I utilised my own personal microphone, a HyperX Quadcast USB mic. Although audibly the quality was not bad, it was only capable of recording in 16 bit, which I was unaware of until I was putting together the final project. Again, if I were to do ADR in the future, a more professional microphone would be used in order to create the higher quality recording.
For the suburban scene foley, I layered a few recordings of birds singing from the early hours of the day, as so there would be little background noise to match the suburban scene, as well as the sound of my neighbour’s dog barking to add to the illusion of the stranger being a rough person. Moreover, I recorded the sound of my lawnmower and made it much quieter, just for the little extra detail of the scene where in the atmospheric shot you can see a person mowing their lawn. This atmospheric layering really helps to sell the scene, instead of just having it be silent with speech over the top. In terms of equipment used, I hired out the Zoom H4n Handy Recorder from the University’s media loans department. I used this recorder as it was easily portable and allowed me to record the sounds with ease and without much setup, essential when trying to record random events such as the dog bark.
For the main portion of the scene, I headed to my local bowling alley and asked for permission to record ambience, such as the sound of bowling balls being rolled, and pins being knocked over. Again, I used the Zoom handy recorder as it meant I wouldn’t attract much attention when recording, as otherwise people may have come up to me and asked what I was doing, ruining the recordings.
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