What Game of Thrones pulls off visually each week rivals anything you might see at a movie theater, and in tonight's episode, "The Dance of Dragons," we got some fire-breathing action. But it's not just the sights of Westeros and Essos that amaze—it's the sounds. Take last week's giant ice zombie battle. The steel-on-steel clashing of a swordfight. The scream of an undead horde. The grunts of giants. The sumptuous visuals on Game of Thrones stun in part because a talented team of sound designers lends life to them. Esquire sat down with Game of Thrones' supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel to discuss building the show's rich audio tapestry, how they decided what a murderous skeleton sounds like, and whether or not those White Walkers are going to start talking any time soon.

It's been said that the mark of great sound in movies and TV is that you don't notice it. So I hope you understand what I'm saying when I say that I never notice the sound in Game of Thrones.

I'll take that as a compliment! That can be a compliment most of the time.

I think there are so many misconceptions about how sound is created in the entertainment industry. What exactly does a supervising sound editor do? What is your daily job?

I lead a team of sound editors, which would consist of a dialogue editor, an ADR editor, the foley crew, the sound effects editor, the sound designer, and I also go to the mix stage, where we take everything we've put together and make that final soundtrack that you hear when you watch it on television.

Many average people who just sit down and watch a TV show don't understand the amount of work that goes into creating sound in postproduction. What is the audio like when you first receive footage and how much of the finished sound is added after the fact?

Game of Thrones has excellent onset mixers who focus on getting clean, well-recorded dialogue. However, in huge action sequences, like in "Hardhome," which involved wind machines, crowds, and stunts, that can be nearly impossible. 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. Sometimes, it's for technical reasons, sometimes it's for clarity, sometimes it's for accent, in case the actor's accent wasn't right on a line. Most of what you're hearing, especially on a show like this, is replaced after the fact. 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. All doors that you hear opening and shutting. Horses. 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. I oversee everything except the music.

What is the difference between working on a feature film and a series like Game of Thrones, especially since a season of Game of Thrones tends to feel like a 10-hour feature film?

The basic process between a television show and a feature are very similar. Feature films are usually given a lot more time to do these things. The amount of time we get on Game of Thrones versus the amount of time spent on a feature with that much action is very different. We do the best with what we're given to give the show a feature film-sounding soundtrack. For the most part, the process is very similar, but a feature film will have a lot more time to get the sound editorial done and to mix it.

So, "Hardhome" is amazing. For a show so known for violence and twists, there is a lot of silence of Game of Thrones—hushed conversations in quiet rooms. How do you approach a sequence that is all sound and fury? How far in advance were you aware of this episode's challenges?

I'm usually pretty ahead of the game with knowing when the big episodes would be. In seasons one, two, three, and four, it's always been episode nine. This season, for the first time, episode eight was the biggie. I knew far ahead of time that this was going to be a big one. "Okay, we've got some smaller episodes. Let's make sure to keep our reserves ready for the back part of the season." I got to see a very early cut of it to have an idea of what we had in store. I won't lie—after watching it the first time I had to go forget about it for a bit because it was so overwhelming. What you see when it aired was very different from what I saw the first time. Tons of green screen. A lot of the extras are multiplied. They didn't have thousands of extras. They had hundreds. They had plenty! But they were going to add more people, bigger crowds. Wights and White Walkers were running around in green outfits.

On a set for a big action scene, there is going to be a ton of noise that can't be used. About how much of that the episode's climactic sound had to be recreated in the studio?

"Hardhome" has got to be 98 percent. I can only think of one actor we couldn't get back in the studio, so he has two lines in there that are from production. There are other little yells and screams that are actually from production, but just about everything else was replaced. The giant's lines are from that actor [Ian Whyte], but anything of him grunting or yelling was replaced.

With swordfights and galloping horses, you are completing the illusion of reality. With the wights and the White Walkers, you are creating something totally unreal. How does your team approach sounds that don't exist? Do the showrunners have an idea what an ice zombie sounds like or do you create it all on your own?

The first thing we do is meet with the showrunners [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] and talk to them about what, in their minds, things will sound like. What direction are they looking for? Now that we've been on the show for a few seasons, we have a pretty good idea of their tastes. They can give us a pretty general idea of what they're looking for and then we will start creating and sometimes bounce ideas off them. We'll send over a little Quicktime of what a scene is starting to sound like and run it by them to make sure we're on the right path. 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. There are some different mutations of their sound and some sound different. 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.

The wights draw from all kinds of undead types across popular culture. Visually, they quote everything from classic zombies to Jason and the Argonauts. Did you ever sit down and decide which kind of zombie you wanted to emulate or did you want to create something entirely fresh and new?

We weren't given much to draw back on. [Benioff and Weiss] definitely like to find unique sounds, unexpected sounds. A lot of times, that is the first note we'll get when we play something back for them. "That sounds really cool, but people expect it to sound like that. Let's give it an edge that people don't expect." With the wights, we had different actors in the loop group doing a bunch of different vocals and we'd comb through them and say these are cool, let's take these and modify them and make them interesting. Once you have a horde of thousands of [wights], we were layering a bunch of different sounds together so you could feel the mass of them coming at you.

So here's my real uber-nerd question for this conversation: In George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels, it is specified that the White Walkers speak a language called Skroth, which is supposed to sound like cracking ice. Have we heard Skroth yet? They're an awfully silent bunch.

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], but it mixes into the crackling ice sound that we use for him moving around. It's pretty subliminal at this point. Who knows? Down the line, if there's more interaction with them, we may hear more of it.

I know you can't say anything, but surely as a sound guy, you must hope to one day work on a single scene that contains dragon growls and wight sounds?

That would be fun! I can also say that I know nothing of those two worlds colliding. I know nothing about next season, so I couldn't even spoil anything for you if I wanted to. But yes, a dragon versus White Walker army scene would be a fun one. Maybe that's the series finale one day! I have no idea.

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