I recorded the fireworks last silvester with a Zoom H4n (
http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h4n/) which costs about 300.- € here. Eats batteries like mad, but the sound is great.
All other sounds were recorded with an SPL Nugget (
http://spl.info/fileadmin/user_upload/p ... 5_PI_D.pdf) which I got for 350.- € at a sale years ago. The mic goes into a Behringer Ultragain MIC 2000 mic preamp (about 150.- €) and into my Mac from there. This is still low class equipment, but doesn't sound cheap in any way. I do my own music, and occasionally voice recording here as well, and this equipment already produces a good enough studio sound.
The trick with soundtracks is to create atmosphere. In this case the continuous fireworks masks all imperfections and noise from other sounds. Additionally I sent all room effects through a room reverb simulation which gives them a feeling of really "being there". The clock was a drumkit which I pitched + 2 octaves. The wallpaper coming down was made with a piece of stiff wrapping paper, slid along a shelf and then crumbled. Recording and trimming done in Audacity, arranging and mix in Logic.
Even with cheap equipment or found sounds from the net you can do a lot.
1. Get your levels right. Record loud enough without any clipping. After that, normalise everything.
2. Trim your sounds. Remove any excess noise before and after. Apply a fade in and out if necessary.
3. Filter. Often you'll have a hum or grumble in a sound FX you need to get rid of. Or you need to enhance an otherwise dull sound.
This is all done in preparing the separate sounds. In the mix, you do:
4. Level and filter. Don't overdo it. Often a small sound in the background does more to the scene than a prominent effect. Sometimes reducing frequencies is better than just fade down the volume. Spread your frequencies so different sounds will have different hot spots.
5. Avoid complete silence unless it's a story point: between scenes, or after some gag.
6. Create atmosphere instead of unrelated sound FX.
7. Create a feeling of room. Use delay and reverb, but not uniformly. Example: dialogue tracks don't need as much reverb as a ticking clock in the background. Imagine the distance of each sound from the camera and build from that: near = loud and less room, far = soft and more room.
8. Make the sound style fit your animation style. Example: experimental animation from the 60's often has soundbits brutally chopped off, which perfectly complements the jerky animation.
