Tim Kimmel on The Sounds of White Walkers
(Please note: this article contains no spoilers about last night’s episode. Proceed!)
One of the things I’ve noticed this season is a stepping up of the sound design on Game of Thrones, especially when it comes to the soundtrack in the background of the episodes. Not just the music (though I do think Ramin Djawadi has outdone himself in places this year), but the overall sounds of the show. So I was very interested when I ran across an interview yesterday in Esquire with Game of Thrones‘ supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel. In it, he discusses the work that goes into creating the believable soundscapes for the fantasy series, especially when creating scenes that couldn’t possibly happen in real life, like the White Walker battle in last week’s Hardhome.
[H]uge action sequences, like in “Hardhome… involved wind machines, crowds, and stunts… The first step in the process once I get an episode of a show is to go through it, see what kind of shape the audio is in, and see if we need to fix or replace any of it. We then put together a sheet of all lines needed to be done by actors after the fact, which is called ADR, automated dialogue replacement, where we will replace the lines in a controlled environment…Most of what you’re hearing, especially on a show like this, is replaced after the fact.
Dubbing has been used in moves since the advent of sound, but it’s a bit surprising to learn that most of the dialogue is recorded outside the scene itself. Hollywood magic!
I have a sound effects editor who will put together the ambience. The wind, the birds, the waves crashing when you’re by the water. That kind of stuff…The sound designer is the person usually in charge of creating newer sounds that you won’t find in an effects library, like the giant, the wights [reanimated corpses], the White Walkers, and the dragons. The foley crew [provide] the footsteps that you hear and all the props that you hear. If someone picks up a sword and puts it down, it would be done after the fact in a little studio, picking up a sword and putting it down while recording it.
Kimmel calls last week’s episode “the biggie” of the season in terms of production, and admits that when he first got the cut of the raw footage from it, “I had to go forget about it for a bit because it was so overwhelming.” He says about 98 percent of what we heard in terms of dialogue and sound in general was actually recreated in the studio and overdubbed due to the sheer amount of tech roar in the background of the original footage.
When it comes to creating the sounds of creatures that don’t exist, Kimel says he’s learned over the years what sort of direction the producers are looking to go in:
The wights were a little tricky because some of them have been reduced all the way down to skeletons. There are no vocal chords. How can they be making sounds? But this is a television show. If they’re running at you with their mouths open and no sound is coming out, it kind of loses its impact. We’ve had to find the right sound, the right kind of voice for them, which has taken some time….In earlier seasons, they made little to no sound, but as we’ve gone on, they’ve started making more sounds. With a horde of them charging in on Hardhome, we had to have more sounds coming from them.
When asked about the White Walker language, Kimmel shows that he’s aware that in the books, they have one, and he’s made sure to add hints of it here and there.
We have put little hints of Skroth in there with the White Walkers. Season one had a little bit of it in the pilot. Season three, with the White Walker that Samwell kills, you hear a little Skroth coming from the distance to signal that something is coming. There is a hint of it with the White Walker that was fighting Jon Snow [in “Hardhome”], but it mixes into the crackling ice sound that we use for him moving around. It’s pretty subliminal at this point.
Still, it’s good to know that the White Walkers do have their language, even if we haven’t been able to hear it very well yet. For more of this interview, check out Esquire.com.
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