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  ==Conception and production==
  The title sequence was created by three teams: its design, which forms the bulk of the project, was done by Elastic, the computer graphics by a52, and the title sequence editing by Rock Paper Scissors. Elastic had previously created the title sequences for ''Rome'', ''Big Love'', and ''Carnivale'' for HBO, and they were approached by Carolyn Strauss of HBO, with whom they had worked on these shows, to create the title sequence for ''Game of Thrones''.  Angus Wall, the head of title design firm Elastic, met with Strauss, the showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, and producer Greg Spence to discuss the project around a year before the show debut.
  When the pilot was first made, it was felt that the geography of the imaginary world of Westeros and Essos might confuse the viewers, and that maps could be useful as navigational guides for the viewers. An early suggestion was to use animated maps as a transition between scenes to orient viewers, but that idea was dropped as it would interrupt the narrative flow. The idea of the map was therefore moved into the title sequence.  For the original pilot, the showrunners Benioff and Weiss initially wrote the title sequence as a crow's flight from King's Landing to Winterfell;  however, the production team at Elastic thought the idea was too flat and devised the idea of using 3-D models within a sphere that represents the world of the show. The sphere was used to obviate the question of what might lie beyond the horizon of the map, and the whole sphere is lit by the sun in the middle. According to Angus Wall, the title sequence had "a concrete function in the world of the show, in that it serves as a legend the way the map at the beginning of a fantasy book orients you." The title sequence informs the viewers of the locations of the show relevant to each episode, and changes to reflect the storylines of the show and changes within this world.
  On the use of an armillary and models with moving parts, producer Greg Spence explained that Angus Wall at Elastic came up with "a vision of a mad monk, in a tower somewhere," who was somehow keeping track of all this action "and creating as he went. He would then fashion little automatons out of the materials that would be available in his world. They would be stone, or tin, or wood, and everything would feel very hand-crafted." The idea is, therefore, that everything in the title sequence could be created with hammer, saw, and chisel, and operated with gears and cogs. The turning gears and cogs were meant to be reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions.
  The design team were given a list of the locations where the action may take place in each episode after the shooting had completed, and they had around 3 months to create title sequences. The concepts, including details such as the machinery used, were first sketched by hand, and the models were then created with computer graphics.