It’s easy to praise Game of Thrones for its acting and directing and all that, but a lot of the most impressive work flies under the radar. That’s by design. If you’re, say, a foley artist working on the show, you don’t people to think about how you made the sound of swords clashing or arrows flying; you just want them to enjoy it.
But lots of work does go into making those noises sound believable. Business Insider sat down with the show’s supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel to learn the tricks of the trade. Watch the interview below, with plentiful aural examples!
I love stuff like this. Some interesting takeaways:
- The sound of Jaime’s golden hand clanking against things was were created using a frying pan. It’ll be hard to look at his scrapes in the same way.
- I never wondered about this until they talked about it, but it makes sense that they would have voice actors come in to record different screams and grunts and yelps and stuff for the battle scenes. It must be a fun job to decide which of those to use for a given scene.
- The Battle of Winterfell was complicated. “I know we maxed out the amount of tracks we were able to use on the system we were using, which I believe is 720 tracks,” Kimmel said. “And that was just for sound effects, and sound design, and Foley, and backgrounds, so I think on the dialog side there was probably another 200 tracks and another 60 tracks or so of music.”
- Okay, I know people didn’t like the way Rhaegal’s death happened, but his death cries were brutal and it’s hard to think of sound designer Paula Fairfield having to create them, since she’s always felt so close to the dragons.
- “[E]ach army had their own sounds, their own kind of palette that we worked with to kind of try to set them apart from each other,” Kimmel said. So a Lannister spear sounds different from a Stark spear sound different from an Unsullied spear, and so on. It’s crazy how much thought and work goes into this that you don’t really notice.
And of course, Kimmel points out the importance of not losing contact with our main point of contact even when a battle has a lot going on. A good example of that would be Jon Snow’s fight with the White Walker general in “Hardhome.” That battle is chaotic and loud, but when these two square off, the soundscape flattens thrillingly.
Kimmel also works on shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Castle Rock, both of which are a long way from Westeros. Thanks for all your work on Thrones, Tim!
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