kipod71

lebowski was awesome! it was my first big budget show and everything about it was cool. the first week, the assistant walked in with a contract i had to sign. it was five pages long and was written by the coen brothers and, what it came down to was this:

the coens had a tradition of taking the post crew out for a steak dinner on the last night of the mix of the movie. back on hudsucker proxy (i think), one of the brothers was talking to one of the sound editors and somehow, the subject of porridge came up. the sound editor said that he had never eaten porridge before. the coens thought this was a terrible oversight and henceforth, if you wanted your steak dinner, you needed to attend a porridge breakfast on the morning of the first day of the mix. the contract was to ensure that we all understood those terms and would not try to get out of eating porridge. i've worked on three coen brothers films (lebowski, o brother, and the man who wasn't there). as a result, i've had porridge with frances mcdormand and steak with holly hunter.

the coen brothers also give great swag. for lebowski, everyone got a deck of playing cards with the characters on them. the dude was the joker, of course. we also got caps with an embroidered logo for "log jammin'" on the front and "ich bring mein tools" on the back.

yep. sometimes it's the only way to amuse myself. i slipped the wilhelm scream into a scene in treme once. stuff like that.

ha. he's a total douche. (hi josh)

hmmm... the thing is that a lot of sounds in movies are cheated. we don't fry bacon for a rain scene or anything (maybe i will now, just because) but a lot of things just don't sound the way you think they should in reality. plus, movies are trying to make things hyper-real.

the lesson about what you see and what you hear not always being the same hit hardest for me on sense and sensibility. it took two weeks of searching for the perfect quill pen on parchment sound and in the end, it turned out to just be a fingernail on paper. and the youngest dashwood girl has a quick moment in a montage where she is playing in mud with a stick. my finger slapping the top of a quart of cottage cheese.

that it's glamorous, maybe. either that or the other end of it - that it's technical and not creative. my job is to use sound to help tell the story. i need to know some technical things to accomplish that, but it's still an art form. one that involves many hours in windowless rooms staring at a screen so, not glamorous.