With that said, I headed down to G23 today to meet up with Tom, Phil and Kamil at 2:00pm. The actual scheduled meet-up was for half-past two, but I decided to get the room unlocked and recording equipment from the booking office. The booking office itself was closed early today (missing the sign in a hurry) but fortunately, the Equipment Hiring desk were able to carry out the rest of the plan.
There were some slight confusions with the booking (Ben Oren booked the studio for today) but regardless, it was cleared up and I began setting up the studio, microphones and all. Phil Farmer turned up and helped out further - he also brought along a bowl and 6 packs of bottled water for the peeing effects! Thomas and Kamil arrived momentarily, though we were lost somewhat on getting inputs and outputs to correctly work and configure - fortunately a staff member associated with Sound recording was nearby to get us going.
We cracked on with recording the various sounds of urination. Initially, Phil tried squeezing the water out of the bottle and into the bowl but the microphone picked up the cracks and squeaks of the plastic. Moreover, despite the sprinkling of water sounding quaint on Phil's end, it was a deluge on ours. It was far too heavy to sound natural - something that editing wouldn't take far enough to fix.
Phil headed back home to pick up his plastic measuring jug; pouring the collected water out of there has a much greater control over the velocity and force of the, ahem, stream. I also scurried home to pick up my HandyCam for more documenting. Back in the studio, Phil experimented with various means towards getting the flow to sound natural. Better results came when the water began by hitting the sides of the bowl, then flowing into the body - this sort of process does came when weeing into the urinals after all. Characteristics associated with urination were applied as well, such as the last-second pauses. The urination sounds that were on target were the ones that enticed us to go spend a penny. Tom couldn't hold his bladder after a while when hearing the recordings over and over.
VIDEO HERE
When satisfied with the final outcome, we moved onto the other important follies - the most important being the jeans dropping. Getting the right sense of weight and power was harder than we had first suspected. Often, the initial drop would be too soft and staggered, and the actual impact was too rugged. Phil's belt also didn't have enough metal to achieve the jingling, so in its place he used a pair of keys to simulate the effect. Likewise, clothing outside of trousers were experimented to attain a heavy feel.
Views on how the jeans should actually drop were also contested; Phil was satisfied that sound of impacts were good enough to give a believable sense towards the trousers touching ground - Tom however wasn't satisfied that they matched the character and shock-factor of the scene. Saying that, we settled on splicing the better parts of the 'drop' and the 'crash' together to compose the right form of sound effect.
We finished just in time for the studio needing its equipment back, 4:25pm. Tomorrow, we'll be doing the next part of the Voice Recording though it largely depends on whether Ben Greenwood (who voices the presenter) can make it for 10am. Sarah Pollard will be back with us too as today was her big day for net ball.
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