Just stumbled across some pictures on my phone from a hilarious recording session a couple of years ago. The project required some very specific water movements in a bathtub. Picture the scene: two characters in a bathtub, making out, before one tries to drown the other. All in very foamy water. Not exactly something you can easily find in a library. So, perfect excuse to put on my swimsuit, channel my inner child and splash around!

Here’s the before picture (not pictured: the mayhem after):

Since there wasn’t any space for a monitor, the plan was to record everything wild with plenty of variations for each type of sound. Here’s a rough list of everything that was needed:

• General small foam and water movements, from slow and quiet to fast
• Trickles: sparse and dense
• Surfacing and plunging movements
• Underwater hits against tub
• Air bubbles and underwater screams (turns out I can in fact scream like a woman under water)
• Splashes as character thrashes around

As expected, all recording discipline went right out the window within minutes of splashing around; so instead of a set of nicely voice-slated files, categorized by type and intensity of movement, I ended up with about 20 minutes of total recording time more or less randomly spread out over 15 files. Looking forward to rejiggering and tagging this mess before I put it in my library…

Another problem was the foam. Not only is it very quiet to begin with, but it also stops making any sound whatsoever after the first couple of minutes. The only solution? Creating more fresh foam by pouring in more and more body wash. I’m pretty sure by the end of the session there were more chemicals than water in the tub — my skin can attest to that.

All in all, just another day at the office.

UPDATE: Funnily enough, somebody uploaded that specific scene to youtube. Here’s the final result (Warning: most definitely NSFW):

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouesPYdFavI&showinfo=0?&theme=light ]