How the House of the Dragon opening credits ties back to Game of Thrones

The opening credits for Game of Thrones became iconic pretty much from the jump: a camera sweeps over a map of Westeros, showing us which locations we would be visiting that episode. It was simple, information, and cool to look at. And the earworm score by Ramin Djawadi didn’t hurt.

Kirk Shintani worked on designing those opening titles, and HBO hired him again to work on new ones for the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon. This time, instead of sweeping over a map, the camera pans over a complicated family tree showing us how the many characters on the show are related to each other. As the narrative skips forward in time and new characters are born, they’re added to the mix.

“Originally, we tried to find a balance between the story we needed to tell but we also had to be really aware that it needed to have some tie to the original show,” Shintani told Deadline. “The concept boiled down to the family tree and how we show the relationships between the different members of the warring families.”

"There is a big thing that maybe people don’t consciously think about as Game of Thrones. There is a specific language that we’ve built with these flyover cameras, moving from place to place, and that’s something we definitely wanted to keep in the show…The world map was very much intentional of showing people where you are in each episode. Whereas for this one, the world’s already been defined and the key locators that we’re trying to explain aren’t locations, it’s the people’s positions in the family line."

The House of the Dragon opening titles are cool, although most fans agree that they’re not as visually informative as the ones on Game of Thrones. Unlike season 1, the upcoming second season of the show won’t feature any big jumps, and things will start to sprawl geographically. You have to wonder if they’ll keep the new titles or switch back to the old map.

We won’t know for sure until House of the Dragon season 2 premieres on HBO and HBO Max sometime next summer. In the meantime, there are some other interesting opening credits sequences that deserve attention:

The ideas behind the opening credits for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

In terms of huge fantasy TV series, House of the Dragon’s biggest rival right now is probably The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a show set during the second age of Middle-earth. For this opening sequence, designers Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore zeroes in on the power of music, which is foundation to The Lord of the Rings creation myth dreamed up by author J.R.R. Tolkien. As the music plays, it seems to create various symbols familiar to fans of the his legendarium.

“Tolkien felt that music was almost the center of the universe,” Bashore said. “That was perfectly in sync with our view of filmmaking, which is that audio can be more important than visuals.”

“The idea of music creating something brought us to cymatics,” added Crawford. Cymatics, for those trying to build their vocabularies, is the natural phenomenon by which vibrations move small particles around a flat surface to form patterns, which is what we’re looking at in The Rings of Power opening credits. “It’s hypnotic and beautiful, always shifting and changing… representing elements of transformation.”

Explaining the opening credits of The Last of Us

Finally, there’s The Last of Us, HBO’s latest big hit. This show is about people struggling to survive after the world is decimated by a fungus that turns people into zombies. The opening credits show that fungus spreading over the land.

Designer Andy Hall said that producers Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin wanted people to be able to understand the opening credits sequence even if they hadn’t played the original The Last of Us video game series. “They wanted it to set up the tone and the idea of what the show was about, but not rely on what people’s associations of the game was,” he said.

Hall created the opening sequence with Nadia Tzuo. “They didn’t want to see any dystopia-cliché in the title,” she said. “They only wanted to see the fungus—how it grows, how it spreads and how it resembles a developing species…It’s like they’re thriving at the same time the human civilization is on a decline.”

The mark of a good opening credits sequence, I think, is whether you fast forward through it. I appreciate the artistry on display here, but out of these three, my favorite is probably The Last of Us sequence. How about you?

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