The final season of Game of Thrones is up for a whole lotta Emmys; 32, to be exact, a record-breaking number. Although the cast members and directors get the lion’s share of attention, it takes a village — a big one — to make a show as complicated as Game of Thrones, and plenty of other behind-the-scenes professionals are also up for awards. Below, two of them tell us how they made the final season a feast for the ears.
Let’s start with supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel, who talked to SyFy Wire about the importance of scaling back sound so the audience hears what it needs to hear. Apparently, the final season was a lot louder before the editors took over.
For example, in “The Long Night,” we were originally going to hear the noise of the battle outside in the scene where Arya sneaks past a number of wights in the Winterfell library. And that wasn’t all that got cut. “We used to have a sound where the door closes,” Kimmel said. “We had multiple sounds for that — like she bumps the door, or bumps the latch, or bumps her head — to draw the attention of the wights. But then we ended up turning it down so quiet that basically there was no sound at all; the wights just sense that she’s in the room, that she went in that direction, and they head that way.”
I think that was a good choice. It underscored how quietly Arya could move, which helped sell her surprise killing of the Night King later in the episode.
Then there’s the bit where the Dothraki charge into the horde of undead, only for us to watch as their flaming arakhs go out one by one. “At one point, we had it so you could still hear screams in the distance, and injured horses dying,” Kimmel said. “But the more we got into the scene, the more we realized, ‘No. Let’s make this quieter. Let’s really keep everybody guessing.’ And so we pulled it back to just about nothing.”
Kimmel and his team applied the same thinking to the initial clash between the wight army and the Unsullied, pulling back on the screaming vocals so they had somewhere to go later. “You want to go loud,” Kimmel said. “But if you start at 10, you have nowhere to go after that.”
Clearly, “The Long Night” provided Kimball and company with plenty to play with. All that and Kimball provided the voice work for the giant taken down by Lyanna Mormont. “Because he was a zombie giant, we did a lot more layering of animal stuff and bone sounds to give it a wight quality.”
But he worked on a lot more than just that episode. Particularly interesting were his comments on “The Bells.” Apparently, the original cut of the episode was a lot more brutal, with more of the citizenry in King’s Landing dying in gruesome ways. “It was shocking what aired,” Kimball said. “But even more shocking was what didn’t. They scaled it back, but they still got the point across that Dany was frying everyone.”
Sonically, there was a lot of debate over the bells in “The Bells.” How loud should they be? Should just one ring out, or several? “There was a lot of back and forth on the voices,” Kimmel remembered. “Do we hear one voice? Do we hear ten voices? Do we hear the whole city starting to call out?” In the end, what was important was that the message was unmistakable. “Nobody can miss the fact that they’re saying, ‘Yes, we surrender,'” said Kimmel. They can’t miss it, but they can ignore it…
And then there was the final scene, with Jon Snow and company heading north of the Wall. Warm weather is finally returning, as we can see with the small plant poking through the snow. The Wall is also “weeping,” meaning that the outside is melting a bit. Apparently, that effect was originally more pronounced, but showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss asked that it be scaled back to just the sound of a trickle of water.
“It felt a little anticlimactic, because it was such a minor moment,” said Kimmel. “But, as they put it, it was the final decision they had to make after 13 years. So David, Dan, and I were staring at the screen, like, ‘Well, I guess that’s it.’ And then it was hugs all around.”
Also key to the aural landscape of Game of Thrones is sound engineer Paula Fairfield, who for years has created the sounds made by the show’s many mythical creatures. “My job on the show was all the fantastical elements,” she explained to Forbes. “The dragons first and foremost; the Wights; the White Walkers; the dire wolves; the warging, dreams—all that stuff. That was my job. With the dragons, they changed every year. Every year, they grew and grew grew and grew. And then we had an ice dragon.”
"If you go back and listen to Drogon’s calls in Season 7 and 8—and you go back to Season 3—you can tell it’s the same creature, just bigger and older. That was the challenge: how do you do that? … All different kinds of animals, and it’s all culled like a little mosaic, little bits and pieces of stuff that are emotive, that are molded and sculpted to create this creature. [A sound] that is carrying a lot of emotion in the sound and the angst to bring you to that threshold of believability. And part of that is if you feel something, you’re gonna believe it a little faster, so it’s about pulling the viewer into the fantasy world and making them feel like they’re a part of it, and that’s always been the challenge."
Over the years, Fairfield used the sounds of over 30 different species of animals when creating the dragons’ roars, including rhinos, a Mississippi sandhill crane, and a pair of orphaned bear cubs. Those cubs came into play when Drogon was nudging Daenerys’ body after Jon killed her, a heartbreaking moment.
Even more heartbreaking is that one of those bear cubs was shot and killed after being released back into the wild. “One of the things that I would like people to pay attention to is that you love the dragons and you believe that they’re real,” Fairfield said. “They’re being vocalized and their expressions are expressed by the vocals and the sounds and the voices of animals that are on our planet that we are killing and that are disappearing.”
"What I would encourage people to do is to think about that. You love the beautiful voices of the dragons, but the beautiful voices of the dragons are made of about 30+ species of beautiful voices that actually inhabit this planet that are not mythical creatures—[animals] that are actually real and also dying. It really is sort of an irony that we can love something like that that doesn’t exist, but we can turn our backs on the animals that do exist, so that is one thing I would love people to think about."
At the moment, Fairfield isn’t involved HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, tentatively titled Blood Moon. But she’s never saying never, to that or any of the other fantasy shows on the horizon. “I’m certainly open to any of that,” she said. “A lot of these shows are just kind of getting off the ground and trying to figure out what they’re doing and who they are and whatnot, but I think over the next few years, we’re gonna see a lot of fantasy and I’m excited about it. I love the genre, so I’m open to going forever … I just feel very grateful that I was allowed to explore and wander through this beautiful world of Thrones. It really has been a really special experience.”
Weaver and Fairfield will both be up for awards at the Creative Arts Emmys, which will be handed out over the course of two nights on September 14 and 15. The best of luck to both of them!
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