Silence or no silence (in space)!

One of the problems we encountered when discussing the sound design for the short animation I am working on was whether or not to add sound to the shots that took place from outside the space shuttle. Realistically sound is non-existent in space, however, we decided the audio would be more interesting if something was there as opposed to nothing. We referred back to shots from films and inspirations that we were going by and found good examples of shots where audio is present from outer space as well as ones where there is little or none. A good idea we ended up utilizing was this shot from Interstellar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lcGnMhvsA Around 15 seconds in one of the scientists gets launched from the docking shuttle unexpectedly and there is a short burst of an explosion followed by the effect of air escaping from the explosion. This shot is a really awesome way of exaggerating the silence of space in comparison to the actors inside of the shuttle, and whilst our explosion shot does not start inside of the shuttle, we thought we'd use this effect, in the same way, to capture the same silent dramatic effect that it creates in this scene.

Another option was to have the composition completely take the front and have the sound design either extremely minimal such as just having background ADR and some debris movement however there was not a great amount of this activity during the shots so this was not an option. a good example of this is Gravity's explosion shot that can be seen here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prlIhY3e04k