'Labor of Love' Reveals a Passionate Porn Foley Artist

LOS ANGELES—Almost a minute into a short film titled Labor of Love, the young film craftsman profiled in the piece addresses the camera as if at an AA meeting, intoning, "My name is Grant Myers, and I am an adult folio artist."

But Myers, rather than being ashamed of his profession, is in fact the embodiment of a man fulfilled in his work creating the sounds and sound effects that "paint a picture" in porn movies. The obvious pride he has in his work is the film's theme.

In the 4-minute short, he is seen with his equipment recording everyday sounds out in public (a car door being closed, a paper bag blown down the street, water dripping from a hydrant) and also in his studio, where he uses a myriad of everyday objects and substances (a zipper, shampoo, plastic bottles, dirt, meat) as well as his mouth, to breathe erotic life into the normally mundane sounds created by bodies in friction on set.

In terms of the pecking order of vital sensations created by porn, Myers is convinced that sound is the magical ingredient.

"Think about it," he argues. "When you're watching an erotic film, you're watching pixels. Pixels aren't real. Sound is real. Sounds is vibrations in the air. That's the contact the performer is making with the viewer; it's not visual. the sound is the thing that's touching you. You're not hearing it, you're feeling it... the sound is where the sexual activity happens."

Myers also waxes on the universality of the pallet at his disposal. "Every sound is erotic," he says. "So when I'm doing field recording all I'm doing is contextualizing the eroticism, and when I layer that on to my films and to the work that I'm hired to do, I'm layering on depth, and I'm layering on substance. It makes something real of the world; it adds context, and it makes it authentic. It makes it live and breathe and drip with sound."

Yeah, baby.

For the doubters, Myers reminds them, "You can close your eyes; you can't close your ears. Your ears are always open."

And it's okay if people still refuse to hear the truth. As far as Myers is concerned, he's a one man band.

"I do what I love and I do what I hear, and I hear what I love... and love what I hear," he says softly in closing.

The primacy of sound in porn is well known to AVN, which has previously addressed the subject.

The deft mockumentary, directed by Jack Pearce, can be seen on YouTube.

Image: Grant Myers hard at work doing what he loves best.