Brian Nimens often has to send contracted employees out to the Nevada desert because that is the only place where you can fire off guns ranging from pistols to bazookas, and set off earth-shattering explosions without disturbing people. Is Brian Nimens a mobster the ilk of the Robert De Niro and J’e Pesci characters in Casino? Hardly. Nimens is the president of Thornhill, Ont.-based Sound Ideas, the largest publisher of commercially available sound effects in the world.

‘To record guns and explosions we go to Vegas.’ says Nimens. ‘The gun laws are quite different down there. Hell, you can’t even touch an Uzi up here and down there you can go rent one.’

Nimens and his company are just part of the wild and crazy industry of sound effects creation frequented by sound effects editors and foley artists. These are the people who put the snap, crackle and pop into our film and television experiences.

Nimens’ Sound Ideas has been around for about 20 years and boasts a total of over 20 different sound effects libraries. The company has also done joint ventures with six of the major studios including 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal and Lucas Film to release their sound effects libraries.

Nimens uses surveys of industry people to find out what new sounds are most desired. He recently commissioned his engineers to record figure skating sounds. ‘We hired two professional skaters to do all sorts of jumps, quick stops, moves and falling because it was something we’d been asked for a number of times and it wasn’t in our library.’

Other recent recording adventures for Sound Ideas include getting clearance to record nascar sounds in the pit area at a race in the u.s.

Speaking of nascar noise, sound effects editor Dave McCallum of Tattersall Sound has been working on the Alliance series Fast Track. To get the appropriate roar of car engines they acquired the library that was recorded originally for Paramount’s Days of Thunder, and have used field recording to enhance the sound design. This included borrowing the Porsche Boxster that one of the show’s characters drives.

‘We went up to Kettleby, Ont. and put a rig on the car,’ says McCallum. ‘We stationed a microphone at the tailpipe and a stereo microphone inside the car to get the sound of the wind. We were going 100 miles an hour down this road in Northern Ontario, so I guess we were breaking the law.’

Field recording is what all sound effects people love to do. Given their druthers they wouldn’t use cd libraries, but budget and time constraints make Nimens’ collections a necessity.

‘Resources are what dictates whether or not you record a lot of original sound.’ says McCallum. ‘If you’re on an mow that you have to turn over in three weeks you just don’t have that luxury.’

McCallum’s boss Jane Tattersall has been a part of the film sound industry for the last 15 years. With a myriad of credits, Genie and Gemini wins and nominations, she is among the leading sound editors in the business.

Tattersall is quick to point out that sound effects design is not just matching sounds to objects or action on the screen. An example is her work on the teen drama Straight Up (Alliance) where she says producer Adrienne Mitchell’s sound creativity and savvy makes every episode a challenge. In a recent episode, Tattersall used a combination of musically sampled feedback and screeching train wheel sounds whenever a particular character was acting motherly towards another.

‘The sounds we use are often completely unrelated to the picture, but somehow they become evocative of the mood a character is experiencing,’ she explains.

Tattersall was on the scene when everything was recorded and cut on analog tape and a synchronizer was used.

‘A synchronizer was a mechanical, hand-cranked thing where you ran sound through a tiny little head that went to a speaker,’ says Tattersall reminiscing. ‘Your hand would crank the wheel and if you changed speeds the pitch changed. Now that’s primitive sound effects creation. You can do the very same thing on the keyboard sampler today. What hasn’t changed is that you’re dealing with the same raw elements that you always have ­ location recordings of cars, wind or crickets, et cetera.’

Tattersall switched over to digital about six years ago and uses the Waveframe or Studioframe systems and Pro Tools. Other than the speed of digital and the convenience of being able to play back sounds for directors, she d’esn’t see many pros or cons of digital. ‘It’s still the editor who uses their ears to judge what works or d’esn’t work.’

What has changed for Tattersall is the occasional request to create sound effects with little or no picture because of cgi or compositing.

‘There’s a film we’re working on now called The Teacher Ate My Homework, and we’ve got roughed in images but it’s all being done cgi so we won’t know what the final image looks like until very close to the mix,’ she says. ‘A lot of the time we’re creating sounds with no picture.’

From the sound person’s perspective, one drawback to the speed and ease of digital has been the shrinkage of turnaround time. Tattersall explains: ‘If it’s possible to do it faster ­ they want it faster. We turn down work that has to be done too quickly because it can affect the quality. I’d rather be known for good work and cost a little bit more money than just being a sausage factory.’

Kevin Howard is the chief sound effects editor at DAVE Audio, and he’s been around long enough to see turnaround times decrease as producers become more aware of the speed of digital. ‘That’s the catch-22,’ says Howard. ‘With tape you’d get three weeks to cut a one-hour show because it took that long, now sometimes we get four days and it takes longer than that.’

Howard and his partner Dave Trusz, who operates the Synclavier, do the sound for F/X: The Series. The fantasy show is ‘busy’ in terms of sound design and keeps them both working full time on a 10-day turnaround per show. In fact, DAVE Audio is so busy this summer that they farmed out the sound effects on Alliance’s Once A Thief to Jeff Jackman and Billy Turchinetz at Venom.

Working on a Solid State Logic Screen Sound system, Howard says he records interesting location sounds whenever he can to get the desired organic elements as opposed to electronic effects.

When f/x was shooting on a ship in the Toronto Harbour, Howard got permission from the shipmaster to record some sound. ‘We went into the cargo holds which had been empty for several years and rolled some heavy metal across the deck, and recorded reverberant bangs, hatches and stuff inside this great cavern,’ says Howard, who is an ambient sound specialist.

Tricks of the trade:

trading barks

As with all sound effects editors, Howard is always looking for new sounds. He has a network of contacts around the world who he trades field recordings with on the promise of not releasing them to anyone else.

‘I’ve got friends in France, l.a., New York and Florida and we all trade certain sounds with one another. A friend in l.a. did The Mask, so he gave me all the recordings of the Jack Russell dog, and in turn I gave him a Great Dane recording I had just done for a Paramount feature. The schedules are so tight, sometimes you just can’t go out and record something.’

Foley: an oasis of real time

Whereas digital has transformed the sound effects game, foley artists Virginia Storey and John Sievert both contend that foley is still generally done analog. Sievert says he likes the warmth in the sound of tape, and the fact that you can get tape ‘working a bit.’

Storey agrees. ‘We don’t use much sampling at this point because most of the time it’s just as easy to do something again if you don’t get it right the first time.’ Storey says that she has used Pro Tools and finds it helpful only when ‘you do get something and it’s just slightly out, and if it’s something simple like a hand pat, it’s very easy to just slip it in.’

Both former musicians, neither Sievert nor Storey are willing to divulge any secrets as to original methods they’ve come up with to create the human sounds that a foley artist is responsible for. Storey even denies owning a rubber chicken, says she d’esn’t know about other foley artists, but d’es admit that ‘everything we do is weird.’

And while turnaround time has shrunk for sound effects editors, foley’s hasn’t because it’s still such a manual operation. Storey explains: ‘If you’re doing a series and you’ve got three days to do the hour, it’s still going to take you a day to do the feet. You’re still gonna have to walk that day.’