I wanted to share some info on how this is done for any aspiring sound designers that may be reading.
when I make sounds like this there are basic steps I take,
first, finding the right sound. then cleaning any distortion and unnecessary sounds from the source. This can be done with carefully smoothed out fades as to eliminate any clip sounds that sound unnatural. Then you compress the sound so it is upclose and personal, this is the headache stage because the sound is now raw unprocessed and in your face. This can be painful because when you first compress the sound every bit of overload is very clear. so you have to play with the compression to make it as pleasant as possible first and remove as many offensive sounds as you can at that stage first.
next I add an eq to remove all unnecessary frequencies, ie rumble, his , ear piercing frequencies that became panfully clear after compressing.
Next I would either ad another eq or use the same one to begin to enhance the sound.
So your first objective is to make the sound clean and clear, your second objective is to model the sound to be audibly non offensive. You want to scare the person with a gunshot not hurt their ears. You also want to keep attentive detail to removing excess frequencies because as you add more sounds to your mix, the unnecessary frequencies begin to pile up and become significant in your final mix leaving things sounding muddy and unclear.
The next step is a spacial processor, also known as stereo imaging, This is the software that moves your clean and processed sound around the screen, you play with this processor to simulate where you want the sound to come from. If you use a sequencer, you can automate this to follow your character, it is more effective than panning because it simulates environmental reactions, in other words, the echos and reverbs in the room sound appropriate or close to what you would hear in real life, not just a simple pan, but how the sound reflects off of a wall 3 feet away.
the final stage, is adding the right reverb, no 2 rooms sound alike, and depending on where a sound is coming from in the room the reflections may be different, so there is no 1 reverb that is perfect for all sounds.
Finally, I use logic pro with a variety of 3rd party plug ins such as the UAD system which emulate the million dollar mixing boards and eq's that are used in large studios, UAD makes some amazing sounding quality plug ins.
the order mentioned above is the order I used for these particular effects, but in reality there are no rules, whatever is clever, sometimes for creating a super distant sound you may want to change the order of your process, or for that matter you may need to eq the final output for that extra "special sauce" -smiles- in your art.
auadacity is a great program thats free open source for those who wish to experiment with sound.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
~ricky
☯🐉
"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu