The Epic Sounds Of The House Of The Dragon
The Game of Thrones saga continues with a new spin-off: the story of the Targaryen dynasty, 300 years before the events that took place in the series directed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. As with the first series, this time the directors also faced a huge challenge: how to visually and aurally represent fantastic beings such as dragons? Worse still: beings on which the axis of the story is largely based. After all, it is impossible to think of the Targaryens without winged dragons that spit fire and destroy everything in their path.
So, today we will talk about what was behind such creation: that range of sounds without which the experience of watching a fantasy series is not possible (even if the audience pays so little attention to it).
According to James Utting of Factory Studios (who worked with The Mill on this production), the fundamental considerations in designing the sound of dragons and the rest of the elements in the story had more to do with their methodical approach to sound design itself. For instance, because the roar of a dragon or the noise it makes when spitting a jet of fire is always uncertain, what to do to make the sound that natural? According to Utting, what he did was to divide the sound design into three segments, all triggered at point seconds during the beginning, middle, and closing of the dragon animation. So, it was a matter of dissecting many sound segments and inserting them to build the magic we wanted to convey.
Another big challenge was to make sure that each dragon produced a sound of its own, and, at the same time, that the audience knew what a dragon sounded like. For example, sound designer Paula Fairfield explained on Twitter that the Caraxes has a deviated septum and that's why he roars differently from the others. Harry Boyce also mentioned that, when creating a dragon sound, it was divided into small elements that were then used in a systematic way by mixing the pitch and volume of these clips randomly. Thanks to this, an extensive range of possibilities was available.
Paula Fairfield, who has worked since Game of Thrones, has been known as a very creative designer. The raw material for her creations originates from quite peculiar sources, for example, real animal noises in unfamiliar situations, such as those produced by turtles or other reptiles during mating. This was used by Fairfield in Game of Thrones for some sounds of Drogon, the great black dragon of Daenerys Targaryen (Khaleesi). This idea came to her from her interpretation of the story. In that first season, her husband, Khal Drogo, a powerful warrior leader, dies and is cremated along with her and three dragon eggs. What happens there is that she doesn't die because she can’t get burned, and the eggs hatch. According to Fairfield, Drogon, the most powerful of the three, is a kind of incarnation of the Dothraki king and builds with Daenerys an almost sexual relationship. This draws the viewer's attention in an almost subliminal way.
She has also said that the noise her dog makes when breathing through its nose (a sort of whistling sound similar to a sniffle) allowed her to create sounds for these fantastic creatures. It is a barely imperceptible sound, but one that she managed to capture, augment and alter to the point of assembling it into a fantastic figure; and she uses it not a few times in The House Of The Dragon.
As David Bowie used to say: "it doesn't matter where you take it from, but where you take it to". That’s actually the basis for Foley Sound, by the way!
On the other hand, James Utting implemented a new workflow system to design sound on a non-linear platform. According to him, curating incredible and unusual dragon sounds and incorporating them into an animated landscape thanks to FMOD and Unity was a fascinating journey that tested all his expertise. As in all the arts, technical tools and advanced technology are determining factors to compete and offer differentiation from other creators; however, it is useless to count on the best software, best microphones, studios, and equipment, without a trained mind to produce new elements from others that previously had no apparent connection. A good sound designer is, above all, a dreamer who travels through imaginary worlds and perceives sound in an almost plastic way, like objects that can be stretched, shrunk, melted into new alloys, become transparent, or dense. That ability is catalyzed by technique, indeed, but does not originate there.
For this reason, if you need experts for your audiovisual projects in film, television, video games, or other formats, don't hesitate to contact Enhanced Media Sound Studio. We will know what to do to take your production to the next level.
*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com