Wednesday, October 3

The Sound of Pee

So I don't normally blog about my personal experiences here or anywhere for that matter but this is just too funny and weird not to blog about. I'm currently in graduate school studying visual effects for film/animation and one of the classes I'm taking is digital audio for film. In the class, we're learning how to create foleys and sound effects and then editing them into a movie. This past monday, our teacher showed us a short 2 minute movie that had absolutely no sound to it, we would be creating and adding all the sound to it. This is were the story/class gets interesting or maybe I should say a bit weird.

The movie consisted of our teacher walking into a men's room, going up to a urinal, peeing, washing and drying his hands and than walking out. Now granted we thankfully didn't actually see him do any actually peeing, this men's room has the great dividers in-between the urinals. Yet we could still make out the moment he unzips his pants, whips it out, pees, does a little sigh, shakes it off and puts it back in and zips up.

We can't actually record someone peeing into a urinal because as the teacher said that would probably get him fired. So we than proceeded to have an in-depth 20 minute discussion about all the sounds we need to recreate from the moment the zipper zips down until it zip backs up and and how to recreate them. We then proceeded to the nearest men's room to start recording. We only go so far as to record the sound of the men's room door opening. Next week will be the big week were we will be spending essentially the whole class in a men's room recording sounds for this oscar worthy short film.

Since we will be using microphones around water, our teacher asked us if we had any ideas how to keep our microphones waterproof. He seemed kind of annoyed that no one knew the answer to this because he thought it was so obvious. He than went into his backpack, pulled out a condom(unlubricated) and held it up high over his head.

So not only will we be spending class time in a men's room but we will be using condom wrapped microphones to do our recording. Yep higher education at it's finest.

Writing out this blog post got me thinking about the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in the woods and no ones there to hear it dose it make a sound? I guess this could be applied here also. If a man pees in a urinal and no ones there to hear it does it make a sound?
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4 comments:

Unknown said...

I've had to use a condom to keep a mic dry before

msquared said...

yeah you seem like the type of guy that would need to keep a mic dry.

Clumsy said...

i know this is really random. and this post is so old you may not even look at this comment, but.. if someone is peeing, there is someone to listen to it ;) so it does make a sound! :P

msquared said...

Clumsy: I like you're logic and reasoning. I guess the pee would make a sound, but what if and this is a big what if. What if the person who is peeing is deaf, would the pee still make a sound?