Joe Kraemer’s career has encompassed music for film and TV – as well as audio adventures of Doctor Who for Big Finish. Perhaps best known for his work on Jack Reacher and the most recently released Mission: Impossible film, Rogue Nation, Kraemer chatted with Paul Simpson in January 2018. In this part they discusses his travels in the TARDIS… 

How did you get involved with Big Finish?

When [Jack] Reacher came out, another figure in Doctor Who history also friended me [in addition to Closing Time director Steve Hughes – see part 1 of the interview here], who’s also a huge soundtrack fan. His name is Andrew Cartmel and he was the story editor under John Nathan-Turner in Sylvester McCoy’s era. I had been a fan of the Big Finish audios, especially the McGann ones, because Paul McGann’s Doctor existed more on Big Finish than on film. I knew Andrew had written for Big Finish, so I got a little cheeky and asked if he could wrangle me an introduction to Nick Briggs at Big Finish. Andrew was only too happy to oblige.

Nick and I exchanged emails for a while, and then they offered me the chance to do the sound and score for a Doctor Who spin-off, Vienna. I did an episode of that and Nick was really happy with it.

The next thing they gave me was a Sylvester story called The Defectors, in which McCoy ends up in Jon Pertwee’s timeline, with UNIT and Jo Grant. It was a great episode for me as my first Doctor Who, because I had a lot of fun taking the Dudley Simpson sound of the Pertwee era and working in that, but also marrying that with the contemporary orchestral sound that is more like what Murray [Gold] was doing for the TV show. I didn’t really do the Sylvester era stuff that Dominic [Glynn] and Mark Ayres and those guys did; I thought it would be too confusing to mix the Simpson with the Ayres with the Gold. I just mixed Simpson and Murray.

That went off really well: Nick was the director of that one and he was really happy, and the producer David Richardson was really happy, and they keep coming back to me. When the schedules allow, and we’re in sync with each other, I’ve been doing them ever since.

But it’s all thanks to Andrew Cartmel.

I can often tell your work without checking the credits, because it has a slightly different feel to the other sound designers and composers. Are you given specific instructions by the directors or are you left to do it the way you think will work best?

In terms of the overall process I developed my approach to doing the shows based on my experience working in Hollywood. When I first moved to LA, I worked on sound on The Simpsons and The X-Files, and movies like The Mask and Dumb & Dumber and Independence Day, so I had this history of working in sound as a young man trying to break into composing. I really approached these with that cinematic approach.

I break it down into steps. The first thing I do is cut the dialogue as if I’m cutting the picture of a movie. One thing that really strikes me is pace. I’m a huge fan of the National Public Radio adaptations of the Star Wars trilogy for radio and the thing they really got right for those is pace. They really move along so fast. I spent a lot of time tightening the performances in the Doctor Who stuff, not because it’s slow or whatever but because I’m trying to keep it moving really fast. I’m always looking for places where I can just nip half a second space between stuff, and characters are overlapping a little bit and moving.

So I get the voices right and we then “world-ize” the voices. We put them in a space that fits where they belong, and we do what I call the “camera blocking” – we place them in the stereo field and then we do the footsteps to match that.

So we’ve got a dialogue track and a footsteps track, then we do a background track ,which is really just room tones: the TARDIS control room, an alien control room, or if we’re out in a meadow. Then a soft general effects track – traffic, spaceship rattles – and then a foley pass: in The Defectors, there’s a scene where they’re sitting in a pub, eating at a table and there’s all sort of movements of forks and scrapes and napkins, and a lot of cloth movement.

So I’m doing a whole movie’s worth of sound design on the show, rather than an audiobook with sound effects. That’s how I learned to do sound in the first place, so that was a natural decision for me to make.

Once that’s all done, I create stems for each of those elements and then I score that. What’s fun about doing the audio adventures versus a movie is if I want to add a few seconds so I can put a little musical thing in, I just open it up and put the musical thing in. I don’t have to worry that I’m changing the picture. On a film, you’re locked to picture; in [an audio drama or] a book I can open it up, it’s much more fluid. That’s really nice.

In the process of doing these audio adventures over and over again I’ve trained a friend of mine in the process; he came from the music world as well as doing audio books for the blind, which were less production-involved but very much about editing a reader’s dialogue. His name is Josh Arakelian. He helps me with the shows now; he does most of the heavy lifting for the sound, then I take over and do the final mix and the music. But I’ve trained him on how I did the first few and he’s copied my method.

What’s the biggest challenge?

The hardest part I suppose is when you’ve got an alien and you need to sell that alien with sound only. In The Defectors, the principal aliens were almost like giant butterflies and you’re trying to convey that image using only sound. That’s liberating, because the budget to create that in a TV show might be very limited, but using nothing but sound, the sky’s the limit, as long as we figure it out. We could have a million butterflies flying around and we don’t have to pay for each one. We can have a battle between fleets of spaceships and it’s all about the sound, not about creating those spaceships. We can have an army of millions fighting on a field, and we just have do the sound – we don’t have to get a thousand extras to do it.

The Behemoth featured a hippo named Clara and that was a challenge because we needed to convey a beast of heft and size but we didn’t want to be cartoonish – so you’re trying to strike the balance between going over the top and also conveying something that you have to exaggerate because you’ve only got sound.

The trickiest things are the unusual things we have to sell only by sound. It’s funny how evocative sound can be: the most simple sounds can be evocative and sell stuff. We did an episode called Vortex Ice that all took place in various caverns; you just put reverb and a little water dripping and you’re in a cave. Very simple and it worked.

Static was a lot of fun – that’s been very well received by various publications and websites. It was a bit of a different bird. Vortex Ice and Cortex Fire I really strove to do a Colin Baker era score, all synths, with very little of the orchestral approach. Usually what I do is as the show reaches its end, I’ll weave in some orchestral stuff to punch it up, but generally I’ll start out by trying to really evoke the television period that the show takes place in to root the audience in that era – particularly since they generally use the title music from the eras.

I made my own version of the title music – it hasn’t been used, because by the nature of these shows, the title music has already been done. I’m trying to figure out a context where I can sneak out my version of the theme.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve got two Doctor Who stories on the docket – a Peter Davison story and a Sylvester McCoy story, and I’m working on Jenny, a four part miniseries for Big Finish. It’s the most direct connection to the new series that I’ve been involved with.

Click here for part 1 of this interview, in which Joe talks about his work on Creeped Out for CBBC.

And here for our interview with him regarding Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation

Thanks to Beth Krakower for her help in arranging this interview