Sound design for Memoirs of an Alien

The key thing in approaching any project from a sound design point of view is to understand the intentions of the director. When Julian pitched Memoirs I was hooked. The sheer potential of the premise and it's combination of comedy, drama and horrror struck me. When describing it to friends the most apt frame of reference was “Spaced vs Being Human”.

When I saw the working cut I was also taken aback by the chemistry between the main characters, in particular those played by McKinley Blake and Gareth Bennett-Ryan. It was clear that I had to provide something that matched the visuals.

Julian had a clear vision of how he wanted to integrate the music and the initial cut I saw already had very cinematic music attached. One of Julian's goals with the science in the show is to have it very much rooted in reality, similarly the SFX had to operate on a naturalistic basis also.

The first thing I tackled was the opening alien scene itself – in it we are in dreamlike surroundings and we are introduced at the start to an insect or reptilian like alien. Julian was adamant that he didn't want it to sound too much like the prawns in District 9, so we worked at something which sounded enough like an insect to match the visuals, but also had a distinctly realistic vocalisation quality.

We did this by multitracking several recordings of celery cracking and then de-pitching and timestretching the resultant mix. The resultant clicks were then passed through a vowel filter to give it a vocal quality.

Second we tackled another key area – John's transmission. Because of the “basis in reality” approach we used some radioesque static and linked it in with John's dialogue. The SFX are ever so slightly removed from the room in which the scene takes place in order to introduce an ambiguity as to whether the sound effects are in Aaron's mind or not.

After establishing the science fiction elements we turned to creating cinematic rumbles in the most menacing scenes and suitable atmospheric effects to enhance the emotional content of the scenes.

Finally there were some spot effects – the crashing of the vase, a little squelchiness when pushing an eye in and some additional effects to make scene transitions smoother.

It's been a fantastic process with a great crew and a premise “with legs” - I'm sure this will be picked up and I hope to continue working with Julian in the future.

Jeremy Biggs
Sound Designer