Whenever you see a scene in a film or television show that involves characters sitting at a restaurant and talking, there’s usually a pretty good chance that all the characters in the background are extras hired specifically to fill the restaurant up as customers for that particular scene. And there’s also a good chance that in order to record the dialogue of the characters clearly, all the extras are being as quiet as possible, to the point of mouthing fake words as conversation to each other.
Afterwards, the sound design team puts together all the elements of the scene; it’s the background noise of what they’ve decided the restaurant should sound like. This background can include customers interacting, food being cooked and served, music, the door opening and closing, and so on.
One of the biggest challenges for a sound designer is getting the right amount of background customer noise recreated for a restaurant. Ever watch an independent movie where there only appears to be the two characters in the entire restaurant, yet knives and forks seem to be clinking about 2 inches away from your ears? That’s a sign of poor sound design; you don’t feel immersed in the scene, you become distracted by its sound elements.
So how does one go about creating that perfect background noise for a bar or restaurant? Sound designers can bring in sound effects from their vast library in order to create a feeling. However, sometimes these sound effects for backgrounds just don’t match up what’s really going on in the scene. For those instances, a field recorder and microphone can be dispatched (by the foley artist) to record bar & restaurant sounds on location that can be used for the scene.
So the next time you’re watching a movie scene between characters in a restaurant, go back and watch it a second time and listen for the layers of sound design that exist “behind the scenes”. If a sound designer has done his or her job well, the sound blends into the background, vs. taking it over.