Just a couple of days ago, I had an experience that let me turn an otherwise supremely annoying "act of god" into a prime recording opportunity. This reminded me of a comment sound designer Nathan Moody made on an Airwiggles post where someone was asking for advice for staying focused while creating sound effects libraries.

There, he talked about the concept of "Recordings of Opportunity" which is what he calls recording opportunities that arise spontaneously und unexpectedly - and usually while you're busy with something else. More importantly, he pointed out that he will always allow himself to seize such opportunities even while deep into work on an existing project since you never know when they will arise again.

Ironically, I read this comment only a day or so before the aforementioned calamity struck...

Greenhouse Destruction.

On the night of February 29th, we got some serious winds that seemed to mostly sit at the level of the treetops around the house. It sounded absolutely incredible and so I decided to capture some ambisonic recordings of the wind before going to bed. When I retrieved my rig around midnight, everything seemed fine and no tree branches had come down yet. However, the wind started picking up audibly and made it feel like we were living close to an airport.

The next morning, while I was sorting some recycling in our garage, I glanced outside. Where our beloved greenhouse once loomed was now just a rectangle of gravel on the ground, and the greenhouse was nowhere to be seen.

After letting my wife and the house's owner (who found it hilarious by the way) know, I ventured out into the yard to see what happened...

It seemed that the wind must have caught the greenhouse just right, lifted it, and "threw" it in the direction of the fence at the end of the yard. The pieces still attached to the frame were well and thoroughly smooshed when it got flipped on its head, while a bunch of panels and aluminum profiles were flung all the way into the bushes.

Luckily, none of the pieces ended up in the road and no one was hurt. Needless to say, though, I had to clean up this mess.

What does this have to do with sound?

While starting to drag some of the panels away from the fence, I quickly noticed the gnarly friction sounds they made on the still very frozen snow. Without hesitation, I went back to the house, grabbed my Zoom F3, power bank, a dry bag, and a pair of Uši Pro on a tripod, and headed back outside.

I recorded the entire "cleanup session" from various perspectives and ended up with around 45 minutes of raw material.

All of this happened when I had originally planned to spend a couple hours that morning designing sounds for a game I was hired to work on. Needless to say, all of that was delayed quite a bit.

Once everything was cleaned up, I allowed myself a little bit of time to check out the recordings and was amazed at just how usable the raw files were. The next day, I spent about 2 hours editing everything into a library, and now, you get a freebie library with a bunch of friction, rummaging, and impact sounds that are super useful and adaptable.