Scott Gershin is an award-winning sound supervisor, sound designer, and mixer who has been a pioneer and leader in the film and gaming community for over three decades.After studying mixing and music at Berklee College of Music, Gershin was one of the first to use computers to edit and design sound against picture (using an Atari computer to design Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, 1987).
From the mid-1980s, he became the main sound designer at Soundelux, working on award-winning films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Born on the Fourth of July, Glory, and Steel Magnolias during his first two years at Soundelux. In 1991, he established Soundelux Media Labs, later called Soundelux Design Music Group (DMG). His vision was to create a sound design think tank supporting multiple industries. In addition to his film work, Scott and his team also supported sound design for theme parks, commercials, music videos, and industrials (such as Nike) before lending his talents and entering into the interactive entertainment industry, expanding their services to include voice-over recording and casting, as well as music composition.
Scott has designed and supervised such films as Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, Maya & the Three, Nightcrawler, Pacific Rim, Hellboy 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Team America, Shrek, Star Trek, Blade II, Flubber, Heat, Braveheart, JFK, Home Alone, Cliffhanger, The Doors, Book of Life, Tarzan, and American Beauty, to name a few.
After 29 years and the sale of Soundelux, Gershin departed and joined and founded several divisions including Formosa Interactive, Sound Lab at Technicolor, and The Sound Lab, a Keywords Studio, contributing to more than 100 movies and the same number of video games.
He is credited with bringing film-quality sound into the interactive entertainment industry, including working with major game studios such as Riot, Capcom, Square Enix, Platinum, Microsoft, Sony Games, Activision, Tencent, NetEase, EA, Insomniac, and id.
Earlier this year, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Audio Network Guild to add to his 13 MPSE Golden Reel Awards (close to 40 nominations), an Emmy (for Maya and the Three), a Lumiere Award (for his VR work), numerous G.A.N.G. and TEC Awards, and a BAFTA nomination for American Beauty.
With thanks to Scott Gershin for taking the time to talk with HPA.
You have described yourself as an audio photographer.' Can you explain what this means?
Where people will use a camera to capture a moment, my job is to collect audio snapshots or samples of the world around us. Anything that makes a sound-from animals to weaponry to vehicles, to banging objects together, to the sounds of people living their lives A lifetime of collecting or recording sounds that can one day be used on a variety of movies and games to tell stories and create experiences. It's my paint.
I'm constantly listening to everything everywhere I go, creating a mental database of the sounds of life-how they differ from city to city or country to country cultural differences, technological differences. Such as how emergency sirens sound different in different parts of the world or something as simple as the sounds of children playing in a schoolyard or the way different professionals communicate, such as traffic controllers or police dispatch operators. Trying to capture the vernacular. To understand the similarities and differences of each area and generation within an area.
There are just so many wonderful sounds. Often, I will capture them and manipulate them to create something else. But one of the most effective uses of sound is silence-to create contrast between chaos and nothingness. A high-contrast black and white picture. Having an audience only hear themselves breathing. The sudden void of nothingness in a brief moment. When used properly, there's nothing more powerful.
Do you keep a personal library of sounds that you've collected?
Yes! I have close to 5 million sounds now. Even if I am not able to capture a sound, I hear it in my head. So I can reference it later. For instance, I did the FX show Mrs. America, which is set in 1970s New York. Growing up in my early years in NY, I remember the sound of Greenwich Village and New York City. I remembered the sound of the city I wanted to replicate what I remembered so you could even smell it. I wanted to capture and recreate what I remembered, including the accents, the sounds of the city, and the slang and vernacular of that era. I spent a lot of time with the actors in our loop group to capture that sound.
Whether I remember it or research it, I need to be able to capture that realism to be able to do justice to whatever project I'm on. That includes anything from regional dialects to the way people talk when displaying levels of aggression. Or cars. Or weaponry. Or anything. To me, sound is endlessly fascinating. I'm always listening, and I've always got the urge to grab clips and samples of life. I'm always listening to sounds and imagining how I can manipulate them.
Can you give us some examples?
I could grab the whoosh' of an airplane toilet being flushed and turn that into a weapon or a hurricane. With weaponry, I need to be able to capture the essence of a weapon at a volume that people could listen to without blowing their ears out. That's tricky. At the beginning of my career, I worked with Oliver Stone on JFK and needed to be able to capture the fatal shots from Dealey Plaza. During production, they shot blanks in Dealey Plaza so I could hear the echo. With the technology at the time, I was able to replicate that echo, and every time that SFX was played, it started from a different perspective and a different place in the theatre.
These are all things that you find through experimentation and play. That's the creative component of the
