“With the introduction of Game of Thrones, HBO needed to orient its audience to the fictional world in a manner as epic as the drama itself. Two years before the series debuted, we began talks with the show’s creators to brainstorm sequences that would establish the lay of the land for viewers by giving them an aerial perspective—a view of the map as the crow flies. There was a need for a legend of sorts, like what you’d find in the overleaf of a book. “Seven territories were animated, and four iterations of the sequence were developed based on the locations featured in each episode; King’s Landing, Winterfell, the Wall and Pentos were used for episode one. The architecture is a take on timeless da Vinci models, and the seat of power is shown with a sigil, a symbol of the ruling house’s spiritual animal.”