Audio... and the Outside World

Today, our group embarked on our final shoot for our project and the semester.  I kind of wanted to save my post for this past week for today because I wanted one more shoot under my belt doing audio to write a good blog post on it (Arturo, I hope and plead that you can forgive me).   Originally, we planned to shoot inside, but due to a noisy refrigerator, we decided to shoot outside; boy was that a mistake.  When we arrived at our destination, everything was great.  It was a perfect temperature outside as well as little noise (besides some nature noises that we'd accounted for).  But then, the Geese came. And my god did they come.  Hundreds of them from all directions swarmed in front of us to lake cayuga, honking with everything they had in them.  Clearly, we could not shoot their anymore due to the obnoxious noises they were producing and the fact that we could barely hear ourselves talk, let alone try to record it for our project.  We then decided to move all of our equipment and our shot farther down in the park to move away from the Geese.  The geese must have had all hell planned for us because they decided that they would follow us.  We finally decided to move farther back into the park next to a river, far from the lake shore and the Geese.  I had my headphones on and finally, thought we were in the clear on noise and were finally going to be able to get this shoot done.  Little did I know, that the worst had not happened yet.  As we were ready to go for the shoot, a bunch of cars decided that it was an opportune time for them to drive past us as we were shooting, making the recorded audio completely inaudible.  If you would have seen where we were at in this park, you would've thought that these cars were doing everything in their power to screw up our shoot.  I clearly remember one car driving around the gigantic circle at least ten times, and perfectly timed to pass us every time we started shooting.  Once the car noise died down and we finally were able to start shooting, the unthinkable happened, a train decided to come out of nowhere and blow its extremely loud and echoing horn.  This lasted for about 20 - 30 minutes because as you know, in Ithaca, we are surrounded by mountains which creates a whole lot of reverb.  It was not ideal, not ideal at all.  Finally, the train had passed, or was at least far away enough that we could not hear its horn.  We began to shoot again, and are halfway through the dialogue when I hear a loud ping.  I look to my right and realize that there are golfers teeing off at the golf course on a rainy saturday morning across the river from us.  This happened several more times and was followed by more cars and police sirens from in town that echoed throughout the valley.  Needless to say, it was an audio nightmare, and something you can only truly laugh out loud to due to its absolute ridiculousness.  This shoot taught me a lot about the patience it takes to be an audio guy and how well trained your ear has to be to be one.  I'm not saying that I absolutely want to do audio again or in the future as a job, but it was a great experience and is an incredible important thing to have in your films.  Respect your audio guy.  He has to put up with all of natures and mankind's ugly sounds and somehow make them listenable to your ears.