The One Thing Game of Thrones, Westworld, and The Crown Have in Common

How do you set the tone for the sprawling world of Game of Thrones in just under 120 seconds? Ask Angus Wall. For the past six years, the designer—who created the HBO drama’s striking main-title sequence—has been devising new bits of opening animation for Thrones to coincide with the drama’s plot progression. Viewers know within the first two minutes of an episode whether they’re heading to Winterfell, King’s Landing, or beyond the Wall—where the night is truly dark and full of terrors. This year, the show’s plot has taken fans to new and long-absent locations including Dragonstone, Oldtown (where Sam studies to be a maester), and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, which means the sequence itself has also had to evolve.

“Part of our initial pitch was to create unique journeys through the map for each episode that required them,” Wall explains. “So every season when there’s a new location added to the story line, we get the initial concept art from production, and then we go to work.”

Wall is too humble to admit that his own work on Game of Thrones put his company, the design firm Elastic, on the map—but it has. Word of mouth spread since he won an Emmy for outstanding main-title design in 2011, and now these sequences have become a crucial part of Elastic’s D.N.A. On top of advertorial work, like producing the Comic-Con teaser for the Pacific Rim sequel and these viral videos for Batman v Superman, Wall’s team has collectively designed main titles for Westworld, American Gods, True Detective, The Night Manager, and The Crown—and that’s merely a surface-level rundown of Elastic’s prestigious and lengthy résumé.

“Game of Thrones is still referenced more so than anything that is more recent, even like, Westworld or True Detective,” Jennifer Sofio Hall, Elastic’s managing director, notes. “It was an incredibly iconic piece of entertainment. I think it reinvigorated the main-title category for the Emmys, and everything else.”

Planted on the corner of Broadway and Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, Elastic’s headquarters are splashed with prismatic hues and bold graffiti—offering a spray of color to the otherwise muted neighborhood, just as the design firm livens up the small screen on everything from HBO’s The Leftovers and The Young Pope to Netflix’s Daredevil and Iron Fist.

It’s clear from speaking with the creators at Elastic that they don’t consider themselves pigeonholed as graphic designers or glorified animators for ads. Instead, they think of themselves as filmmakers. “You don’t necessarily get into this business to do commercials, per se, or do graphics for a show,” Wall notes. “You get into it because you like movies or you like television, and to be part of that is very exciting.”

Wall didn’t go to film school, but describes his job running the video vault at Propaganda Films in the late 80s as his equivalent. The production company was co-founded by director David Fincher—who would work with Wall on Se7en and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—and came to produce a wide slate of music videos in the 90s. When Propaganda began work on commercials as well, Wall noticed how ad agencies liked to be “involved in every step of the way, from initial conception to shooting to post”—and how editors had begun forming their own companies to meet these increasing demands.

“They say people start companies for one of two reasons—one being they have a great idea, or two they need a place to work. And I was definitely the latter,” Wall explains. Thus, Rock Paper Scissors, initially established as an editing company, was born in 1992, from Wall and producer Linda Carlson, his soon-to-be wife. By 1997, they had also formed a branch dedicated to visual effects. Elastic was launched in 2008, out of a “need to create a little studio”—i.e. “a digital version of what the old studios used to be in the 50s and 60s,” says Wall, something that could integrate the various processes involved in post-production.

Wall’s “big light-bulb moment” came when the company was tackling Fincher’s Se7en, the first main titles Wall had ever worked on. The sharp, unsettling sequence caught the eye of Carolyn Strauss, the former head of scripted entertainment at HBO, who asked Wall to pitch main-title concepts for Carnivàle. With the resulting sequence, he brought that big-screen scale to the small screen—and earned his first Emmy in the process.

His fruitful relationship with HBO continued as Wall received two more Emmy nominations for his main titles on Rome and Big Love. When Patrick Clair came aboard Elastic, he continued this momentum with his striking True Detective opening. Nowadays, show-runners will commonly request a director at Elastic by name to pitch title-sequence ideas—which has allowed the firm to expand its work across both premium cable and streaming.

Clair believes a good title sequence comes down to storytelling. He melded weapons of war with artifacts of luxury for AMC’s The Night Manager. He juxtaposed the Statue of Liberty with Nazi symbology for Amazon’s *The Man in the High Castle.” For Starz’s American Gods, which earned Clair one of his three Emmy nominations this year, he began with a single, provocative image: the crucifixion of an astronaut.

“I’d grown up in a Catholic household, and I’d grown up around crucifixes,” he says. “Crucifixes pervaded church and school, and in some ways they were this really sort of morbid symbol of a man being put to death. In another way, it was just a very powerful but very common cultural icon.” Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, the twisted visionaries behind the Neil Gaiman-based series, told Clair to push the concept further, leading him to construct a “big, wonderful, weird, tacky, scary, gothic” totem pole that played with powerful imagery.

“What I’m really obsessed with is combining design and storytelling,” Clair says. “I think graphic design and animation is one world, and then cinema is another world. So I came up very much through the film school world wanting to make film, but also fascinated by design.”

There have been previous “golden eras” of main titles, particularly in the 50s and 60s; Wall points especially to artists Saul Bass (Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo) and Pablo Ferro (Dr. Strangelove, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Addams Family). He’s waiting for this current era to “peter out,” but the trend of ever-more-elaborate titles shows no sign of slowing. With every season of American Horror Story, FX turns the main titles reveal into a social-media affair. Shows like Feud, Power, and Stranger Things have pushed these sequences in new and exciting directions. Elaborate opening sequences have become a vital calling card for prestige dramas, as opposed to the network shows that boast simpler title cards.

“It’s a very deliberate decision these days when a big drama decides that they want to take the time and invest in the kind of creativity with choosing to have a title sequence—and I think that means if they are at that point, they don’t want to phone it in,” Clair muses. “They want us to do the biggest, best thing that we can come up [with], and they want it to be unique.”

Wall attributes this latest boom in part to advances in technology. He notes that the transition from “100 percent analogue to 100 percent digital” allows Elastic to “do on a laptop what we needed a whole building to do 15, even 10 years ago.” Clair adds that thanks to the advent of the Internet, “our culture is getting more and more visual. It creates this really sophisticated, pervasive visual culture where audiences expect everything to have this kind of slightly abstract, design-driven presence.”

High demand for main titles certainly keeps the lights on at Elastic, but a focus on storytelling is in the fabric of the larger Rock Paper Scissors group. In addition to projects like heavy VFX ads for Jack Daniels and Far Cry, there are creators like director Andy Hall, who was the unsung animation wizard behind a series of videos chronicling J.K. Rowling’s history of magic in America for her Harry Potter Web site, Pottermore. Much like David Yates with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Alfonso Cuarón with Prisoner of Azkaban, he was able to form his own visual vocabulary that came to define these vignettes, even though they were ultimately just short cinematic promos for Rowling’s writing.

The brief running times meant that many of his design concepts were left on the cutting-room floor. “The second film, which was about [the American wizarding school] Ilvermorny—we were at first gonna do that as a whole four-and-a-half minute, five-minute film,” he says. “It changed because Jo [Rowling], obviously, ultimately wanted people to read the material.”

Now that the Rock Paper Scissors has expanded to New York—its second headquarters opened in 2010—Elastic continues to explore new avenues and push what a main-title sequence can be.

Look, for example, at Netflix’s The Defenders, which hit the streaming service last Friday. The show’s opening animation evokes Clair’s work on True Detective; it pictures superheroes Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Danny Rand, all re-created out of pieces of New York City. In just 69 seconds, the sequence gets to the heart of a story about four disparate heroes from culturally unique pockets of the Big Apple, forced to unite to save their home. It’s beautiful, complex, and very Elastic.

Where did the idea come from? Clair can’t say: “They never authorize me to speak about any of these sorts of things,” he laughs. Multiple Emmys aside, even the industry’s mightiest openers aren’t above those pesky Marvel non-disclosure agreements.