Sound f/x Shotgun fire onstage explodes roast beef - any ideas?

[sundryaffairs]

Tricky one. Doing sound design for Claudia Dey's "Trout Stanley" in Toronto. Gotta make a shotgun sound as if its firing onstage without firing it, and it subsequently makes a roast beef explode. Got two main speakers, fixed and unmovable, at the front of the stage, and one speaker at the back. That's it. The actor drops the gun, it goes off and explodes the roast that sits 10 feet away on a stove. Tight budget. Pyro considered, but ruled out due to budget, unpredictability and lack of expertise. Midi solution considered - dropping the shotgun on a trigger, or a cheap wireless mic on the gun, but concerned about reliability on the trigger, and breakage on the mic and budget.

Any ideas?

 

[Morpheus]

My first guess would be routed out the back speaker, and taken on a visual...

 

[BNBSound]

I used to have an old school digital sampler. It was the perfect thing for catching those quick cues. No pitch bending, looping, scratching, or any other nonsense. Just a few MB of internal memory and 8 triggers on the face. There's got to be something similar you could run on a laptop.

 

[noozer42]

shotgun sound and "meaty" thump sound should be pretty easy to find on sounddogs or freesound or an archive like that for little or nothing. Try and find cues that have a few seconds of silence at the beginning and end so you'll have plenty of room to edit them together. You could make your own meat sound by taking a piece of real meat or a wet sandbag and swinging them into something really solid like a cinderblock wall.

I would definitely want to mix these into a single cue, edit it in audacity so that it's ALMOST all in the speaker on the side of the stage the gun is on (with maybe a quick pan at the end to the other speaker for the thump sound, although the two sounds will happen almost simultaneously) and then cue it visually through multiplay or Qlab or whatever. I've become distrustful of live guns on stage after watching actor after actor have to suddenly improvise when the gun refuses to fire.

Hope this helps. Interesting question...

Brad Porter
[email protected]
513-885-8516
DC Freelance Sound Design/Audio Engineering

 

[Anonymous067]

I wouldn't rig the trigger...

I'd just take a visual on the CD/Computer (however you do playback)...

Do what others have said about editing the SFX

 

[Dionysus]

There are a million things you can do (just NOT pyro, since you are in Canada like me, you must have appropriate pyro licences and permissions... Plus there are better ways)..

I would just have the shotgun be a standard prop, does not fire.

There are several things you can do. If all you need is SFX, then whip together a shotgun blast with some sort of sound that makes it sound like it hit the roast and have the SM call it well. Easy.

If you want the roast to actually react that's where we move out of the sound portion of the forum and into the special effects area! (Would move this to there if thats more what you are interested in achieving personally since not all the SFX people may routinely check the sound area.)...

Anyways I would use pneumatics of one sort or another. You can make the roast jump, or fly across the room, you can even have debris fly... All cued by the SM from a visual of when the shotgun is dropped.

The audience would love that indeed.

If you don't have the necessary skills to set up the effect, I'm sure you can find someone in Toronto easy enough.

Out of curiosity which Theatre is this at?