Angus wall discusses how they created the Game of Thrones opening title sequence — which is far more clockwork-inspired than I would have expected for a high-medieval quasi-English setting:
One of the things we realized early on was that you couldn’t really tilt the camera up very far because it raised the question, what’s beyond the map? I kept thinking that if you had all the money and craftsmen in the world, and you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do? In my mind, you’d build the most intricate, beautiful map you could possibly imagine. You’d get the best craftsmen in the world, give them the materials they’d need and give them five years to make this crazy, working, super-detailed miniature.
Our goal was to try to replicate something that looks and acts like a physical object. Art Director Rob Feng referenced Leonardo’s machines which have a timeless sense of design. We wanted the title sequence to be rooted in world of the show, which is a technically unsophisticated place, but to also have a complexity that gives it life. It’s definitely not contemporary! Everything is made of wood, metal, leather, fabric, all natural materials… stuff you could see human hands hammering out and molding.
The fact that I wanted to be able to move the camera anywhere led us to the fact that this whole world had to exist on the inside of a sphere, which took us a while to figure out. I had initially thought, okay, the shape of this thing… imagine it’s in a medieval tower and monks are watching over it and it’s a living map and it’s shaped like a bowl that’s 30 feet in diameter and these guys watch over it, kind of like they would the Book of Kells or something… they’re the caretakers of this map. I quickly realized we were still going to shoot off the map. So the next thought was, what happens when you put two bowls together? You have a sphere. Next question was “how is it lit?” And obviously, If you have a whole world inside a sphere, what would be in the middle of that sphere? The sun! Or whatever the light source of this world is.