Sound designer Paula Fairfield is one of the unsung heroes of Game of Thrones. She’s been with the show since season 3, crafting everything from the cry of young dragons to the screams of wights. She encountered perhaps her biggest challenge yet when working on season 7: conceiving and creating the sounds made by the dragon Viserion, who has been raised from the dead as the Night King’s personal mount. Listen to Viserion when he takes down the Wall in the season 7 finale: those are not the dragon noises we’re used to.
To realize this scene, Fairfield used blowtorches, jackhammers and, incredibly, the drunken cries of Game of Thrones fans! When we were at the most recent Con of Thrones in Dallas, we talked to a cosplayer who told the full tale:
So the story is that this group of fans, all of whom get together regularly for epic watch parties at the Burlington Bar in Chicago, befriended Fairfield at the first Con of Thrones in Nashville, and she later asked them to record themselves screaming. “She’s like, ‘Get drunk and weird with it,’ and we’re like, ‘Done and done.'”
"We just, like, took an evening, drank a fuck-ton of gin and screamed our hearts out, and sent ’em off. And then she came and watched the finale with us, she never told us what it was for. And then when it was all over, she leaned over and was like, “You guys are the ice dragon.”"
Aspirations.
The Variety article the Night Queen mentioned is here; it’s an excellent read, and goes into more detail about Fairfield’s process. I also highly recommend watching the Night Queen and her group of Game of Thrones-loving fans react to the episodes in real time at the Burlington Bar. Seeing them react to Cersei’s destruction of the Sept of Baelor in “The Winds of Winter” is particularly fun:
And here’s them watching Viserion take down the Wall, Fairfield present:
And you can head here to see more of the remarkable cosplay at the most recent Con of Thrones. Game of Thrones fans are clearly the best fans.
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