Game Of Thrones returned last night with a lot of the prior seasons’ trappings intact: incest, gore, characters discussing their lives while having sex, teenage Bran being a weapons-grade weirdo, and much more. Among the familiarity, though, there was also a notable update to the titles sequence, all freshened up for the show’s final season.
An in-depth piece by Buzzfeed News’ Adam B. Vary explored the process through which Elastic, the production studio responsible for the intro, reworked the sequence to mark the changing focus of the final season, reflecting the “immediacy and intimacy” of the concluding episodes. This kind of approach requires great familiarity with the show’s plot and characters, which makes it a bit surprising that Elastic’s art director Kirk Shintani and creative director Angus Wall are apparently, like a whole lot of viewers, extremely spoiler-averse.
Shintani tells Buzzfeed News that the show’s producers are “really good about giving us enough information to be able to make sense of what we need to do, but they’re really careful about not giving us more than we need.” For Season 8, Elastic “did get more specific information” but also, to Shintani and Wall’s delight, not enough to know exactly how everything will play out in the episodes themselves.
Wall doesn’t “want that information ahead of time.” He says he’d rather “just know the bullet points of what we need” because he “[loves] watching the show, and honestly [looks] forward to watching every story beat unfold.”
Speaking to Vulture about their work on the Season 8 titles, Shintani reiterates that he’d “be a little bummed out if I knew what was going to happen before it happened” while Wall adds that “it wouldn’t help very much making each season’s title sequence” anyway.
There’s a whole lot more in the rest of the Buzzfeed News article, including details on how Elastic foreshadows important plot points through each season’s titles, what advancements in technology have allowed them to do to a style first developed nearly a decade ago, and more.
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