The nominees for the 2017 MPSE Golden Reel Awards recently came out, and I’m very happy to report that we got nominated for the fourth episode of Startup! Super happy about this — I really think the entire team did great work on the episode.

It’s also personally rewarding since from a sound design point of view it was by far the busiest and most challenging episode of the season; on top of a slow-mo gun sequence there’s a big exterior shootout as two rival gangs confront each other. That scene in particular was a ton of work since I designed most of the guns from scratch and tried something I never did before: a Heat-style treatment.

Whenever I work on a project that involves guns, there’s a good chance the director will mention the Downtown LA shootout in the movie Heat as a reference. And for good reason: the guns in the sequence sound simply insane and are incredibly scary. What many people don’t know, however, is how that sound was accomplished: all the gun shots are from the original production sound recordings! After spending weeks building the sequence sonically in post and carefully replacing each gun shot, director Michael Mann had the sound team go back to the original production sound recordings. Re-recording mixer Chris Jenkins talks more about it here:

So when director Ben Ketai told me he wanted the sequence to sound like the on in Heat, I got excited; I knew they had used real guns firing blanks on set, so for once there was at least a chance that there would be usable stuff in production roll — no other project I worked on before this had ever used real guns on set. More importantly, it would also match the gritty sonic aesthetic of the show. If ever there was an opportunity to use gnarly, distorted and noisy guns with long tails instead of the short, clean and hyper-detailed modern sonic designs, this was it.

And lo and behold, there was some great stuff in sound roll. The only problem was that there wasn’t nearly enough to cover the entire sequence; most of it was either too far gone in terms of noise and distortion (even when fully embracing the aesthetic) or the guns were way too far away, which just made them sound mushy. So instead, I ended up going with a hybrid approach: for each gun design, I combined a production sound gun recording with one (or multiple) clean designs, either from libraries or again designed from scratch. All of that was then fed through compression, distortion and/or transient shaping to yield the final designs. Fabfilter Pro-MB proved invaluable here to control the tails (which really started getting out of control). The result was a mini library for the sequence that had the grit and acoustic realism of the location while adding some extra punch and clarity (I hope).

The final step was to create more distant versions for some of the guns; towards the end of the shootout, our hero runs off while the gun battle continues in the background.  Most of that was just about flattening out the transients and bringing out the tails more.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the sequence turned out, especially given the insane time crunch we were under. You can check out the entire show for free on Crackle here. If you’re interested in the gun sequence, it’s in episode 4 roughly 36 minutes in.