How to make a realistic gunshot?

[Roam]

I am going to have a couple of gunshots in my film and I was wondering whats the best way to make a gunshot sound real? I was thinking of going out to the forest and record some gunshots and put it in the film, but it sounds to dangerous. Any one have any tips on this?

 

[Will Vincent]

I firmly believe that Sound Ideas offer the best quality sound libraries of any that are out there.. yes that's a bold statement, but I've not been disappointed by any of their material.

Here's the link for their gun/warfare specific sound libraries: http://www.sound-ideas.com/sfxmenu-guns.html

Warning: you may experience sticker shock. Quality comes at a price...

 

[knightly]

Go to a gun range and ask to record someone firing an actual gun (then play with it to make it sound impressive

 

[Danny Aindow]

You might try searching thorugh your dvd collection for some action/war films that would feature a lot of gunshots and look for commentaries by the crew rather than the cast, i watched the star wars episode 4 dvd commentary and it had the sound designer for the film, a guy called Ben Burtt, contributing. He explained in detail how he went about getting sounds for lightsabers and blasters etc, for example he mentioned before breaking into the film industry he worked as a cinema projectionist and the 'humming' noise of the lightsaber is mostly recorded from a projector motor in a cinema projection booth.

I know thats no help to you but you might want to have a look if theres anything like that on films that may have the sounds you want, or look up sound designers on IMDB and see what they worked on. I can see that Ben Burtt worked on all the Indianna Jones films and Munich so maybe worth looking at those for inspiration if you want to go and out make your own sounds.

The suggestions of pre-recorded sounds does seem a lot easier though