Smudge: Don't sell yourself short. As an artist, you know that the difference between newbie art and polished work is in the details, the little nuances that everyone hardly notices--until they aren't there. With sound, realism comes from ambient noise. Crowd sounds, wind, room acoustics, the odd dropped fork here and there...they all turn staged dialogue into a believable soundscape.
Fortunately, nearly all of the decent sound packages like SoundForge can help add those little extras, especially in digitally-faked, er, processed, room acoustics. The trick is not to overdo it.
For this short, you need two different ambience setups, one for the house, the other for the pub. For the house, you want to record about three minutes in a quiet room with the windows open (unless you live near a busy highway--try a park if that's the case). I don't know what kind of recording equipment you have, but it doesn't have to be fancy. The killer for most direct-to-computer sound recording is the horrendous noise that comes from the computer itself, (fans, hard drives, and whatnot.) For ambient recording you can even get away with a standard cassette recorder. If you want a little higher quality, step up to a recordable MiniDisc. They can be had for <$100 and have all sorts of nice digital features--just make sure it comes with a mic jack. A lot of the newer Sony ones don't.
The super-cheat for sound (and don't tell anyone I told you this ) are the new MiniDV camcorders. For less than $500, you can get a basic video unit, but the DV sound spec is the same as that for those expensive DAT recorders, true digital 16-bit stereo, sampled at 48kHz. I was once asked to videotape a Christmas Madrigal at my mother's church, but I had to leave the camera fixed. As you can guess, the video portion was rather boring--forty minutes of a choir standing there singing. However, the audio track was surprisingly good. I stripped it off the video, trimmed out the dropped forks and chair-scrapes, then ran it through SoundForge and punched up the acoustics from a bigger church (a little more echo). I gave a CD of it to Mom and told her I'd do the rest of the video work if she wanted it, but the CD was the best part. Once she let her friends listen to it, I had to burn about 20 copies... She never did ask for the video.
I'm just a newbie at all this too, but all the books I read on low-budget filmmaking yielded a lot of useful workarounds for amateurs. Pros, too.
Clear skies,
Sevenar
