Not terrible but not very good either. The most obvious faults (in reverse order) are:
3. While there are no obvious jumps in the room tone's volume or quality which is good, the overall level of the room tone is far too high.
2. There is little perspective to the sound. You change the shot a couple of times, a master shot then a couple of CUs but the sound does not follow the change of visual perspective. The footsteps have some perspective but the clothes rustling Foley is too present in the master shot for example, the computer key sounds do not change position or perspective relative to the picture and it sounds like a very quiet car is driving through the room. The car has to sound muffled and far more distant, a low pass filter would be a good idea. Also, the car-by cuts in and out too abruptly. Just as with your visuals, the sound too requires focus, perspective and DOF.
1. There is little/no sound design, except for the aforementioned car-by and room tone, there is no sound design. This results in the usual no budget film feel of not much happening and no pace or energy. It would appear to an audience that there's nothing obviously wrong but nevertheless, they would feel there was something not quite right (surreal/unnatural) about the scene and that it was undramatic and boring!
With sound design you literally have to think outside the box! In real life our field of vision is relatively limited and our field of focus is even more limited, not so with sound. We can hear 360deg around us at all times, without even moving our head. What we are focusing on visually combined with this 360deg sound is what gives us our perception of the world around us. We are not consciously aware of many/most of the individual sounds in this 360deg sound world, they just form an indistinct part of our overall perception of the location we are in. However, take all these indistinct individual sounds away and our perception instantly knows something is wrong. The box you have to think outside of is the frame of the picture and in your scene, the only concession you have made to this fact is one car-by, which on it's own sounds isolated, out of place and informs our perception mechanism of nothing.
So, the first question to ask yourself is: What is outside of the frame, where is this room we are seeing? At the moment, this room (and the people inside it) appears to be in outer space, light years from anything or anyone, and that is why the scene feels surreal/unnatural and is boring. You have to make your scene believable to even stand a chance of an audience finding it interesting! To create a believable scene, you have to create an entire, believable environment, not just a visual location or even a visual location with some dialogue and Foley. Not creating an entire believable environment is the most common and frequently the biggest mistake made by indie film makers!!!
So, once we know where this room is, we can start designing sound for it and using that sound not only to make the scene believable but also to inject pace/energy and to create some emotional response! For example: Are there other similar rooms in the building next to the one we are seeing, what sort of rooms are they and what is happening in those rooms? Where is the building our room is in (ie. what environment exists outside the window)? Maybe there are other shots/scenes in your film which visually establish the environment beyond our room, in which case we will have to create an already defined aural environment otherwise we can place this room in any environment we want. If this room is an office in a school for instance, think of all the appropriate school noises, kids running about, talking, shouting laughing or fighting, either in the corridors, outside or both, school bells or announcements, doors or lockers closing or slamming, if you think about it the list is almost endless. We have similar sets of sounds if the room is an office in an office building, hospital, police station or any other type of building. We also have a set of potential sounds for where the building is located. Maybe there is a train station nearby, traffic, an airport or maybe it's in the country. Furthermore, none of the potential sounds in our environment are constant, traffic gets louder or quieter, heavier or more sparse, closer and more distant, same with children' sounds, construction noise, etc. We can use this fact to create contrast, pace and interest when not much else is occurring in the scene. We can also create emotional implications, by using sounds of children fighting and screaming rather than playing and laughing. Distant police sirens, screaming construction machines or screeching train sounds create a different emotional response to pleasant bird song, consumer lawn mowers and private light aircraft. All these environmental sounds can be quiet and mostly quite distant and very distant but just because they are quiet and/or distant does not mean they are unimportant. Done well they create a believable environment, an emotional atmosphere and pace/energy, all of which are fundamentally important to film making!!
Make sure you read the thread Alcove posted a link to!
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