Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
ichael Schapiro MPSE is an award-winning sound designer whose work spans some of the most influential franchises in film, television, and video games. With six Primetime Emmy nominations, eight MPSE Golden Reel nominations, and four Golden Reel wins, Schapiro has shaped sonic experiences that are as iconic as the worlds they inhabit. Whether crafting the digital dystopia of The Matrix Resurrections or the tactical realism of XCOM 2, he blends technical precision with creative curiosity. In this Q&A, we explore his creative approach, tools of the trade, and the evolving nature of sound design across linear and interactive media. BY RYAN DAVID KULL MPSE 90 M PS E . O R G Michael Schapiro MPSE Sound Design Across Film, TV, and Games M Trailblazing Combat Legacy Franchises & Creative Direction You've worked across iconic franchises like The Matrix, Star Trek, and Gears of War. What draws you to genre-heavy projects, and how do you approach building sound worlds that are both familiar and fresh? Mike Schapiro MPSE: Genre-heavy (sci-fi/fantasy) often goes hand- in-hand with "design-heavy," which just works out to mean "extra fun" for me! You find that things aren't as defined by reality with those projects, so there's more room to play and try strange things. Everyone knows what a car sounds like, but nobody really knows what "a flying car powered by cryohelium" sounds like! So, we get to do the process of figuring out what cryohelium should act like. How does it fit into the story? Is it a new element created by a crazed professor? A lynchpin of this future society? Did the discovery of cryohelium save the planet? That kind of thing. How does it work physically, as well as emotionally? As to the second point, I've often thought of my work on Star Trek as archaeological sound design. I've got a small library of some of the original sounds, but not a lot of information on how they were specifically created. I'll often need to dig into analyzing a sound, popping it into iZotope RX to look at the spectrogram, listening at multiple speeds, etc., to try and pick apart how it was made—and figure out what tools they might have had at the time to create it! Then I'll start experimenting with the tools I have today (Kilohearts' suite of plug-ins is key to this!) to come up with something similar, and hopefully, cleaner and fresher. Some of them are harder to define, and some are easier. The first Matrix movie came out while I was in high school, so I almost grew up with those movies. And Dane Davis has well documented a lot of his processes for making those sounds (and he was still the supervisor for Resurrections!), so he was there at every step of the way to help keep things in line stylistically.