Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
44 I M PS E . O R G like we previously did with air. I built this whole library, the vocabulary of water whooshes for that, which I've been using in the last few weeks on the new movie. The sounds still worked in the same way. Recording effects today is essentially the same process, but we use a lot more microphones and higher sampling rates. For The Matrix Resurrections, Bryan Watkins and John Fasal recorded all the gunshots with 32-bit recorders, which gave us a LOT of waveform control as we shaped the firearm characters later. EM: Your work in weapons and guns has really influenced the way action scenes have sounded over the past 23 years. What goes into your choices when sound designing weapons? DD: Well, there are two components of firearms. One is the gun, and the other one is the bullet. And they're not necessarily related in a simple way. One of the mantras that I used to have is that bullets are scary, guns aren't. Kind of a poetic dichotomy for the sake of exploring the storytelling. A gun creates this chemical explosion that creates a pressure wave, a very high-pressure front that moves down that barrel behind the bullet. When that pressure wave comes out of the barrel, all of a sudden the space available to disperse that energy creates a completely different set of equations. So when you record a gunshot, you're recording how that energy gets dispersed from the tip of the barrel. Everybody knows recording a gun is about the space you're recording in—it's not the gun. You can get a .22 to sound like a .45 if you know what to do with that pressure wave, and vice versa. It's about how the microphone capsules are going to resonate with that pressure wave, and what happens when that pressure wave hits stuff. When you record interior gunshots, if there's a fork in the drawer in that room, you will hear that fork go "ninnnnnnng." That's the resonant frequency of that fork because there's so much energy being dispersed. But what is the emotional reality of that character of the gun? How scary is it? In terms of storytelling, your ear sends a message to your brain saying, "this is very distorted because it is a very large physical event. Run." That is how your ears and your brain calibrate the scale of the threat, the danger. And distortion is a beautiful instrument in itself. When I'm designing a gun, I go further and think about, "what is in that distortion? What is going to make us want to run away even more?" In storytelling that's huge. The hero's ears are saying, "Oh my God, that's a big gun." Emotionally for the audience to feel that threat is what it's about. I've used dog barks, animal screeches, tire chirps and glass breaks inside gunshots. Early on, I was whacking a broom handle on the cement in a basement. It doesn't sound like a gunshot at all, but overloading the shit out of the Nagra, it sounded just like a gunshot, but it was bright and ugly. It's figuring out what is a genuine emotional impression of an Neo and Agent Smith's final showdown in The Matrix, 1999, Warner Bros. Pictures