Next time you’re watching Heroes or Las Vegas be sure to crank the sound up. The gunshots and slot machines rattling through your speakers come courtesy of Full Sail Recording Arts graduate Eric Gann.
Working as a Sound Effects Editor at Smart Post Sound in Burbank, California, Eric crafts the audio for these hits and more, including Jericho and Crossing Jordan. Catching up with him halfway through the new TV season, he was able to give us a deeper look at the fast-paced world of broadcast audio.
“Television’s got such a quick turnaround – with Heroes, I have three days to cut the show.” he explained. “It’s all about doing the work as fast as you can, but still giving them great quality. We don’t have time to go back and fix things, so you have to get it right on the first pass. The pressure to maintain good quality is always there – but then we probably wouldn’t be working with [such high-profile shows] if they didn’t think that we could deliver that!”
Eric’s role as Sound Effects Editor also gives him the delicate job of interpreting the creative ideas of the producer and the director for each episode – and then translating those requests into realistic audio cues. The process isn’t always easy, but he loves the challenge that comes from creating new sounds to color the mood of a story.
“It’s ultimately about what the producer wants, but you have to give them a starting point,” he explains. “That’s where you’re allowed to be more creative – especially with Heroes, where there are a lot of superhuman things that the characters do, like shooting electricity out of their hands. And sometimes afterwards you’ll get a call from the producer saying ‘Can you make it sound a little more tinkly?’ So the process has a lot of abstract ideas like that, and you have to be able to translate requests that are sometimes a little out of the ordinary.”
It’s that unpredictability that keeps the sound editing process exciting as Eric tackles each new series that comes into the studio. Being able to look forward and envision how a scene should sound is one of the most important traits in delivering audio for these shows on a tight schedule.
“I actually just built a scene in Jericho a couple weeks ago where these guys are breaking into deaf girl’s house, and she’s shooting a shotgun at them,” he explains. “The producers wanted the audio to be from her perspective, and it was really cool because I had to think about what it would sound like to a deaf person when they’re shooting a shotgun. And it worked out really well and turned out to be a really cool scene.”
That kind of creative audio editing brings viewers deeper into the reality of a show more often than they realize, and after talking with Eric at Smart Post Sound it’s hard not to gain a greater appreciation for the subtleties that go into making these worlds feel authentic. Even with a half-decade of television audio experience under his belt, he is still striving to push those techniques further with each episode he sends off for broadcast.
“What puts it into perspective is when I talk to my Mom or friends back home, and they’re like ‘Wow, you don’t realize how far you’ve come,’” he muses. “And I’m sitting around thinking about how much further I have to go. I’m very lucky that I get to work around great crews and on great shows – and I can’t wait to see what comes along next.”
