Opening title sequence of The Shinning

 

Dramatic non-diegetic music starts to play as a birds-eye view of the mountains and lake is shown, this demonstrates a juxtaposition between the calmness of nature and stomach-turning music, throughout this scene a handheld shot is done following the lake down to the car. The opening sequence of this film has a long shot duration which allows the audience to be taken on the journey, this also allows the audience to see and understand how isolated the characters are. We are not shown the characters in this opening scene; we are only teased with a close up of the car which is then diverted. In the first scene, they have used fade transitions between shots, you can tell by the fact that the next scene still has a small faded overlap of the previous scene. 

The second scene fades into a birds-eye view of the car's journey through a forest on a very isolated road. The shot is quite long as it lasts for 20seconds this is quite a long shot of a car going down one road, this is done to really re-aliterate how isolated they are. The tone of the music throughout the shot creates a very unsettling as well as sinister mood.

The following scene is where the credits are introduced moving from the bottom of the screen up to the top. The credits have been done with a very interesting colour choice of bright turquoise, this is done to strongly grab the attention of the audience. In my personal opinion, I believe that this is a very odd colour choice and I believe red should have been chosen instead to indicate danger scene as it is a horror film.The credits continue to the end of the opening sequence. The rest of the scene continues to follow the yellow car with a wide shot. In this scene the camera zooms in on the car allowing the audience to believe we will see the driver, but then the camera diverts to the left meaning that the audience dont see who is in the car.

Finally we are shown a shot of a creepy old building, this is done with a wide mid shot, pararam of the building. This shows the audinece that this is an important place in the plot. Throughout the shot the camera is handheld you can see this by the fact that the camera is shaking. The mountain in background, with half melted snow indicates that this is near the end of winter, this tells the audience that this building is most likely an old ski resort. This scene finalises location of set.