Stop right here if you aren’t completely caught up on Season 4 of Game of Thrones – this article covers spoilers from episodes 1 through 9!

Every time you watch dragon claws scrape stone while watching Game of Thrones, remember this: those are Lee Press On Nails you’re hearing.

Whether or not you realize it, very little of what you hear on Game of Thrones—or any show—is recorded on set. Much of it is re-recorded dialogue (A.D.R.), mixes pulled from the sound library, or something called foley.

A foley artist uses various real-world objects, many of them quite ordinary, to create a variety of sound effects—everything from swords clashing to wind rustling a coat to a throat being slashed.

In an extensive interview, Game of Thrones foley artist Jeffrey Wilhoit, owner of Happy Feet Foley, shared his secrets with VF.com. Those dragon claws are only the beginning. Jaime Lannister’s sword? In part, an old prop sword from the set of The Mummy. Those mammoth roars? A mixture of bear, walrus, elephant, and camel utterances.

For blood, Wilhoit soaks a shammy in water, then squeezes it for that “squishy and gurgly and bubbly” sound. To simulate the sound of two people having sex, he uses his own body parts, slapping “my hands against my chest or my thigh, or something like that. It really depends on how forceful.” And to capture the noise of a sword entering a body, he pokes a hole in something—“it could be the grapefruit I brought in for breakfast in the morning, watermelon, the bottom of a shoe, maybe a jacket, a pair of pants, a piece of denim.”

Working with just one assistant, Wilhoit takes just three days to foley each episode of the show. “It’s like a vaudeville act!” he says. “And it’s messy. My room is absolutely trashed at the end of every episode.”

Ahead, Wilhoit and supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel serve up the ultimate audio guide to Game of Thrones, Season 4, from major scenes to familiar elements. Prepare to be amazed—and a little grossed out!

KEY SCENES

• Episode 1—Arya Stark kills Polliver: “We added the regular squishy little sound of the blood and then we found some foam—I think a couch cushion or something like that—and you can slide something very sharp into that, and it has a different sort of depth to it,” says Wilhoit. “And then adding something like a puncture sound for the initial attack of it, as if it’s poking through the cloth or poking through the flesh. I want to say that it might have been a piece of citrus of some sort—lemon, grapefruit.”

• Episode 2 – Joffrey Baratheon’s death: “That one took some time,” says Kimmel. “There’s vocal recordings in there, there’s some animals in there. Once he starts choking it’s not really Joffrey you hear for the most part, even though we recorded the actor doing it. It didn’t sell for us, so we were going into the library and doing our own recordings. There’s a recording . . . it’s a woman impersonating a choking baby. It’s great because it’s a really tight, low sound. We have our producer [Greg Spence] in there. He is Joffrey’s last breath that you hear. We just didn’t have the right last little gasp, and so he did that. Between editorial and mixing it and tweaking it, there’s a good six to eight hours that went into those 30 seconds.”

• Episode 5 —Jon Snow kills Karl Tanner: “Yeah, when it came through the back of his head and out of his mouth!” says Wilhoit. “That was definitely a sword going through cow skull . . . but also I remember filling my mouth with a lot of water and trying to get that gurgle-y kind of sound, opening the throat up and doing a bit of a gag-y sound. I was really happy with the way that turned out!”

• Episode 7—The Mountain de-entrails a slave: “To really sell those intestines, we used boxing gloves. We kind of grind them into the wet mess we make—aloe vera, dirt, pea gravel, all that stuff. You make a little pile and concoction of it, and sometimes you rest the boxing glove on the ground and build all the gooey stuff on top of it and then sort of squeeze it and slap it with your hands to get the timing of the “plop-plop-plop-plop.” And then you go back and do the next piece and go “squish-squish-squish-squish.” And then do it again and get the sound of the wet shammy hitting the dirt. So you perform it three times in the same rhythm with three different textures.”

• Episode 8—Blood dripping from ceiling after Ygritte spares Gilly: “There must’ve been three or four different textures of blood that we used in that to help it seem full and have the different running and dripping sounds. Some of the other drippy stuff was aloe vera to help thicken it.”

• Episode 8—Oberyn Martell’s death: “In the lead-up to the head explosion, the kind of squishy sound, as the fingers are going in, there’s some raw-meat squish that we used, kind of moving it around a little,” says Kimmel. “There’s probably 10 to 12 sounds just on that head pop. A lot of it was stuff I recorded or stuff from our library that we cut together to get the point across. We used squishy wet elements such as fruits and vegetables . . . A lot of the sounds that we mix in are just labeled ‘fruit smash,’ but I believe there is a watermelon in there, because it has some oomph to it. . . . There’s a bubbling sound in there that’s mud bubbling. There’s some crunch in there, some bone breaks. We have actual bone breaks that we’ve recorded over the years, be it chicken bones that we pitch down to make them sound larger, or what have you.”

• Episode 9—Ygritte’s death: “This was a really fun scene to put together,” says Kimmel. “In the middle of all of the chaos, we got to focus on their [Jon and Ygritte’s] world. In the mix, we pull the entire fight way into the background, and make it just about Jon and Ygritte and their moment. We had Rose [Leslie, who plays Ygritte] in for A.D.R. to re-record her little breaths, whimpers, efforts, etc., so we had them clean. She is great with little details like that, capturing frustration and pain in little gasps. The arrow into her had to punch and get our attention. There is a good thud (low-end punch), a crack (vegetable crack, bone crack), and a stab element (recorded knife into flesh).”

And many more in the gallery below...

/

<<

>>

open

Expert GIF wrangling by Joanna Robinson.