A Glimpse Behind Game Of Thrones

With an estimated 10 million dollars spent on every episode of eagerly awaited Season 6 of HBO's Game of Thrones, you might well wonder how this money could be allocated.

If you begin to consider how carefully a programme moves from page to stage or screen, and, when you read that many characters have over 20 wigs, each up to two feet long, at $7000 a piece, perhaps the budget is easier to understand.

What we are certain about is that Emmy Award winner and former pupil Tim Hands who has been involved with sound and dialogue editing on every episode of Game of Thrones, even including the rarely seen pilot show, will only see a very small fraction of that budget! In any case his best reward would always be derived from satisfaction in his excellent work and recognition from his peers.

We asked Tim to explain a little more about his role behind the scenes. He gave us a fascinating account of his work, which has much involvement in the fictional Dothraki and Valyrian languages that David J Peterson developed for the programme from George R R Martin's original novels. This is what Tim reported:

"Principally my job is to cue up and re-record any problematic dialogue recorded on location. That can be either because the environment was noisy as it might have been recorded next to a river, motorway or building site, or simply to change the performance for a variety of reasons or add new lines for storytelling clarification.

I also record all the background voices in taverns, audience chambers and battles - a pretty enormous undertaking! There are a huge amount of extras on camera and we record voices for most of them. The battles are also almost all re-recorded because the location sound will inevitably be covered in direction calls, and extraneous background noise from people around the actors or wind and snow machines, which will make principal dialogue sound mushy. The lighting can add some unpleasant whistles to the recordings too. You'd be surprised how much cleaning the very best location sound recording needs because of factors that are almost impossible to control 'live'.

This editing means I meet almost every actor in the show and have to consider the languages they use. There are two languages created especially for the show: firstly, Valyrian, which can take the High (gentry) version and the Low form (plebs), and then also Dothraki. For our work, we have to learn a certain amount of the languages so that the background dialogue in foreign scenes sounds authentic.

My own voice appears in every season, often as a variety of background characters, which is a most bizarre experience when I am watching a final episode! I have been a number of Dothraki soldiers but my most 'significant' voice so far was that of the Champion of Meereen in Season 4, who rides out from the gates of Meereen to mock Daenerys Targeryan and challenge her to present a champion to face him in single combat. The actual dialogue was a Valyrian version of the abuse John Cleese shouted as a French soldier from the castle walls in 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'! (Mr Prescott will be very proud- Editor)

For other work, I am involved with dialogue editing, which involves organising and cleaning up the location sound ready for mixing into the final soundtrack of the film or show. On Game of Thrones, this work is done by another editor in LA. I have also been a sound fx editor and sound designer on some films. I do that kind of work less than the dialogue side, but, in short, more or less everything you hear has been added."

This outstanding work has taken Tim a very long way from his fledgling involvement with plays at Bablake, but it is brilliant to hear how proud he is of his work and sense the excitement of every fresh challenge. Like Darren Carnall, Fay McConkey and so many other Bablake former pupils, their dreams really have come true. 

Photograph kindly submitted by former pupil The Literary Omnivore.