It doesn’t take long during a conversation with Gerry Vazquez to appreciate how passionate he is about storytelling through sound design. In just eight years, this award-winning sound editor, sound designer, and re-recording mixer has amassed an impressive array of TV and film credits, including Carnival Row, Yellowstone, Tiny Beautiful Things, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and many more.
Initially aspiring to be a musician, Gerry found he was not quite skilled enough in guitar and piano to pursue music school. Instead, he pivoted to recording and engineering, drawn by the idea of working in studios with bands. Eventually, the industry’s limited job opportunities and the rise of home recording led him to reconsider his path.
Discovering the film and television sound industry offered a new avenue and Gerry transferred from a music college to a film school in Los Angeles. Driven by a hunger for success and the financial pressures of the U.S. education system, Gerry leveraged Chapman University’s film program and alumni network to secure an internship at a local studio, which is where we pick up his story…
I started as a runner, making coffee and parking cars for a studio called Wildfire Sonic Magic, which went out of business about eight years ago. I was told that if I put my head down and worked hard, I could maybe get an assistant position within a year. I quickly decided that I couldn’t wait that long; I’d been studying for four years and had already worked on over a dozen short films and other projects. I couldn’t earn enough to pay my student loans by just making coffee and sitting around. In the meantime, I was taking on side projects, trying to keep busy by working and improving my skills. They would occasionally call me in on the weekends to sit at the front desk and let people into the mix stages. One day, I was working on my laptop and one of the supervisors came by and asked what I was doing. I proceeded to show him an independent commercial project I was editing and mixing.
He asked how much I was getting paid – it was a few hundred dollars for a week of work. I explained that it wasn’t much, but that I was just trying to make some extra money and be productive in what I wanted to do. He immediately said he was looking for a sound effects editor for this low budget project he was working on and asked if I wanted to give it a shot. Of course, I was like, ‘yeah, absolutely. I’ll do whatever it takes’. That supervisor’s name was Bryan Parker, and he’s a very established supervisor in the industry now at Formosa Group, one of the studios I work at. He gave me my first shot and within a month I was an assistant editor. I was incredibly grateful for the opportunity, but I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to be a sound designer, that was my dream – creating inspiring sound effects, recording a lot of stuff, and crafting excellent sound editorial. I loved films like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. I wanted to create those kinds of sounds for movies, and so I just kept pushing and pursuing any opportunity I could get.
I would wait after work, bug my supervisors, and say things like, ‘do you need anything? Can I do anything?’ I just wanted to move up. A couple of months after that, I got bumped up to sound effects editor. In LA, to qualify for union membership, you’ve got to put in about 175 days of non-union work. I got my days in and shortly after that the company went out of business.
I started going door-to-door, meeting supervisors and eventually I met my future mentor – Jay Nierenberg. He worked at SoundStorm back in the day and he had a lot of TV work available. He gave me a shot on a few commercials and a low-tier union project, and after I proved I could handle myself, he took me under his wing. I told him I wanted to be a supervising sound editor and sound designer. He was so supportive and has been my mentor ever since. Anytime I have the opportunity, he invites me to the stage to observe the supervision process. Occasionally he has me help with supervisor duties like attending spotting sessions, cueing and cutting ADR and loop group, and providing stage support on playbacks, just to get more experience, which I really appreciate.
I’ve been slowly making my way up the ladder, trying to get on higher profile shows with award potential. Nepotism is always a topic of discussion in the industry, and I’ve certainly noticed it in my time working in LA. I’ve realized that for an outsider like me to get a leg up, I’ve got to really try and find some award-worthy content to get my name out there. The quality of my work is certainly my biggest priority for any project: I’ll work just as hard on a smaller project as I will on a larger budget show with big stars attached. It’s just that I’ve come to recognize that no matter how hard I work and how passionate I feel about certain projects, sometimes people just won’t see it, or it won’t have enough name-recognition to get renewed for another season. So, I’ll keep striving to improve myself and continue to network so I can hopefully land bigger projects in the future.
Winning the MPSE (Motion Picture Sound Editors) award as a student for my college senior thesis film was a huge breakthrough for me. That immediately put me on the radar. I got invited to Skywalker sound to meet with Tim Nielsen, who got me into field recording and was a big champion of mine. I got to meet Jon Taylor, mixer of the Fast and Furious movies, The Revenant, and a lot of other incredible films. I have to say that I wouldn’t have gotten a lot of these opportunities if it wasn’t for them vouching for me, so I am very grateful for their support.
Where did your hunger come from? Was it instilled in you from your parents?
I think so, without getting too psychoanalytical here, I believe that my parents are the biggest motivators for me. They both immigrated here from the Philippines with nothing. My mom was working at a massage parlour, and my dad was selling alarms door-to-door when they first met in the States. They believed in the American dream and were willing to do whatever it took to make living out here. It wasn’t easy, but eventually I witnessed them find both success in their careers and joy in life.
Watching that growing up, I recognised that if you’re really willing to put the work in, you can do almost anything. I’m willing to put in crazy hours that a lot of people aren’t willing to do, because if it gets me 1% closer to my goal, then it’s worth it.
You’ve got some impressive creds already. Films, TV, commercials… what was the first thing you did where you thought, ‘hey, this is real life, this is proper work’?
It was probably my first union TV show. When I was working at Wildfire, a few big movies came through our doors like Get Out, Hell or High Water, and Moonlight, but I never got to touch them in a creative capacity. They promoted me very quickly, but only so they could put me on very, very low budget shows and pay me minimum wage to work on them.
After a year of doing that, I wasn’t feeling creatively fulfilled. That took a while to get over, but my first job after I got into the union and met Jay Nierenberg, was the Snatch TV show – the spin-off show of the Guy Ritchie movie of the same name. That was the first time I really felt like I had full creative license. The showrunner at the time just wanted a lot of cool stuff. There were a lot of gun action scenes and his notes to me were pretty much just ‘make it sound cool, unique and fun’. That made me feel very empowered because I could just do whatever I thought sounded good. That was the first time I felt like, ‘man, this is fun’. I felt valued for what I brought to the table instead of just being told what to do and it was the first time I believed I could really work in this industry long term.
How do you go about the sound effects process? Are you just given something and have free reign with it? Is it different for each project?
It’s always different for each project, but, for the most part, I have a lot of agency in how I approach whatever we’re working on. If I’m the lead sound designer, we’ll have a few meetings with the showrunner and post supervisor. For example, I worked on season 2 of Carnival Row, which I feel we elevated quite a bit. We got that show during COVID. They’d only shot the first half of the season and they already edited the first five episodes, and they told us whenever they finish the rest of the season, that’s when they’ll mix. It meant I had a whole year and a half to just go to town on sound design. That was the first show I got a proper sound designer credit for. I was working with the show runner and my supervisor, sending them drafts of the monster sound design every week just to show him what we were trying. Then, he’d be like ‘oh, that’s great. Let’s change this. Let’s do that. Can you record something else for this?’ I would go out and work on a particular scene or try to find what we call a ‘design language’ for a monster. For example, I would audition around ten different versions of a type of monster and decide what I think sounds cool, then he’d give feedback: ‘I like this one. I like that one. Can we combine them? Can we try something else?’. That’s honestly the most fun for me because he gives me completely free reign, then we whittle it down to something that we can both be happy with.
Do you try to create templates for episodic TV?
Yeah, absolutely, especially for shows that require a lot of specific repeated elements. In Yellowstone, for example, every horse has its own unique character quality. I tried to make sure that every character has its own character, so to speak, for its horse. Their characteristics are representing the type of horse they ride, for example Rip Wheeler – the foreman of the Dutton ranch – he’s got a big, heavy horse because he has a large, intimidating personality; he has the most responsibility on the ranch. He’s carrying a big burden for John Dutton, so that’s a motif that I tried to slide in there. It’s very subtle.
Another example, going back to Carnival Row: a lot of the characters were fairy creatures and Cara Delevingne’s character has pixie-like fairy wings. I put a lot more effort into trying to make signatures for each character, depending on their personality, to try and make it more unique and engaging.
How do you avoid sonic cliches?
It’s a delicate balance and I pride myself in constantly trying to think outside the box. How can I make something sound totally different or what technique can I use that’s very unconventional to make this sound different? For example, in Carnival Row, the big baddie was a kind of walking vampire creature and the first instinct that many people would have is to make it sound almost dinosaur-like, or roar like a lion or tiger. I think that’s a very cliched approach to designing creatures, so I wanted to avoid it.
We had the conversation very early that we wanted it to sound like something scary, but not cliched, and that boiled down to recording the actual actor doing a lot of interesting human voices and twisting those. The creature itself is made of a leathery skin material, and so I incorporated a lot of those elements. A lot of it comes down to trying to take what I’m seeing and blend as many elements that I can rationally put together within this universe. Trying to come up with some kind of creative history for whatever I’m trying to design, and considering what’s interesting and unique that I can incorporate into the design of an element of the show.
Do you feel that your role is respected in the whole ecosystem of movie making and TV show making?
Yeah, especially at the level of union television and film in Los Angeles, I feel people really do respect us. At a professional level, all the producers show up to the playbacks because they want to make sure it’s sounding good. Beyond that, I just think the industry has got a lot more visibility over the last five to six years, especially through social media. A lot of my extended family knows what Foley is because they see the Instagram reels and YouTube videos about it, which wasn’t a thing before.
In terms of budget, from speaking to other people in the industry, normally you’re given almost nothing with which to ‘create the world’. Do you find that too?
Yeah. We don’t get a lot of resources for this job. A lot of the networking and the moving up in the industry all comes down to what you can you bring to the table. It’s all this unspoken ‘okay, if you’re willing to go out and record some stuff and it’s really good, then maybe that’ll make you a bit more competitive against this other guy who’s trying to do the exact same thing’. It’s hard. For a majority of TV, we don’t really get a budget to do sound design outside of the edit; we’re expected to mainly use library stuff. I still try to go out and do as much as I can in the moment or talk to our foley artists to ask them to record something specifically just so I can do my own thing with it. That matters to me, and yeah, I don’t know what that means for the industry long term, but I’m still going to keep doing it because I just like it.
You mentioned libraries, tell me about how you first got into BOOM Library. Do you remember what your first BOOM Library was?
Yeah, I was working off the studio’s library at the time and I remember when I first got to the sound effects chair at Wildfire, one of my co-workers told me that I should use the ‘BOOM stuff’ for cinematic-sounding whooshes and hits. it was a Cinematic Trailers libraries, Volume One and Two. I noticed immediately that they were incredibly well done, both in the quality of the recordings and the usefulness of the pre-designed sounds. This was before I really discovered my sound design workflow. Earlier in the process I was using a lot of the pre-designed sounds and I still use them quite a bit for commercial work that needs a quick turnaround. As I’ve matured in my career, I find myself reaching for the construction kits a lot more and doing my own design work with them.
You’ve talked about the sound quality of BOOM libraries, but what else do you love about the BOOM stuff?
I don’t know what it is. Every time I feel like I’m in need of a ‘je ne sais quoi’, I feel like they just have something. Last year I was working on a scripted show that had a World War II VR game in the episode and as I started working on that BOOM had just released the WWII Weapons library with all these recordings of MG 42s and German weapons that are hard to find and stuff like that.
It’s like they find the hard stuff to record and create, and they make it seem effortless. I can just slide it in without really having to do much to it. I love the stuff that’s not necessarily common either. It’s easy to find stuff like doors, room tones, whatever; it’s things like their creature libraries – Mutate Organic is one of my favourites. I also use a lot of the Sci-Fi and Magic libraries not just for their intended genres, but also to make my hits and transitions sound more interesting. They’re these abstract ideas that are really hard to realise, and many other recordists just can’t execute them to the same degree, so they’re unique and that’s why I like them.
It’s not necessarily a great sound on its own that I need, but an excellent texture that I can add. Brute Force, for example, is a lot of really, almost distorted sounds that I can add under a layer of a plane flyby to make it sound more scary or aggressive. I think that’s a real power of the BOOM libraries.
Do you find all the metadata side of things helpful when you’re trying to find something?
Yeah, they’re one of the best in biz for that. Tim Nielsen was a big spearhead for the UCS [Universal Category System] movement and I’m a big fan of it. Anything I record on my end, I put into that format.
At first, I was very resistant to it because I was used to different organizational standards, but the more I started using UCS, the more I would understand it because from a glance I can immediately tell what a sound is from the three to four letter tag in the beginning. It’s so much easier to find stuff especially for car recordings, which can sometimes be hard to decipher. If somebody records a whole rig for a car, for example, it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for, so that’s the other thing I do appreciate about BOOM Library.
One request I would have is that they could do more modern car recordings, those are becoming more necessary.
As part of the BOOM ONE subscription plan, you can request a sound to be made and if they can, they’ll make it for you.
Oh really? That’s super useful. On union shows I’m basically a contractor and everything’s project to project. The process of trying to request sound effects for a time was just a headache. Now I have a 12TB sound effects hard drive that I carry out everywhere. Beyond that, I run my own business doing sound for commercial, so I use a lot of that income to fund my library because I’m constantly trying to grow it.
What’s your one bit of advice for somebody who’s trying to get into the sound design world?
If you want the generic answer, just go out and record today, record everything you possibly can. Beyond that, I think it really comes down to getting in touch with your senses and your emotions and letting that kind of guide how you design because everybody’s unique experience is different.
I think that is the value for me, especially. That is the one thing that really gets me going when I get a compliment from a supervisor or showrunner. The greatest compliment to me is ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that. It wasn’t what I was imagining it to sound like, but I like it’. That means I was able to successfully think outside the box and impress somebody. That all boils down to my unique experience of what I am perceiving this thing sounding like, I think that there’s a lot of power in that.
I meet a lot of young people from college who still reach out to me asking how to get started, and they’ll say, ‘I love Mark Mangini, I love XYZ supervisor/sound designer’ but the big question from me is ‘what do you have to bring to the table?’. You can copy them all you want, but it’s already been done. Similarly, I love the BOOM Library pre-designed stuff, but for something that I want to sound really unique, I’m not going to touch it. I’ll reach for the construction kit as I want it to be my signature on a sound. I think that the best advice for somebody who’s just getting started is find that perspective and figure out what story you want to tell because that’s how you’re going to get noticed.
If you’re just copying what’s already been done, then they’re just going to hire someone who has more experience than you. If you bring something unique to the table, then I think you have a lot better shot of making it in this business.
