The Shining

• 1.The Shining.AKA The best film ever to be made ever by anyone and nothing will evercompare to it and I will never loveanything more than I love this film.

2. The Opening Scene.If that doesnt work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw23KM3-Ry8 3. The Location. The opening three minutes of The Shining isalmost completely comprised of establishingshots, showing a peaceful countryside, and a cardriving along it. This is effective in setting thetone for the film, and establishing the isolation ofthe hotel and the characters inside it, as thewideness of the shots show that there are noother people around, just the small yellow car.Isolation is a huge theme in The Shining, and thisopening sequence hints to that. 4. The Credits. There is only one close up in the openingcredits, and that is of the back of the car. At thisprecise moment, Jack Nicholson scrollsupwards. This suggests to the audience that he isthe person in the car, and thus the main focus ofthe film, as he is the first person introduced. The rest of the credits scroll upwards, and use ablue font. There does not appear to be muchsignificance to the colour, other than to makethem stand out on the scene. They are in capitalsfor this reason also. 5. The Camera Angles vs The Music The camera angles (the establishing, wideshots) on their own would make theseopening credits incredibly boring, but whentwinned with the music used, it gives aninteresting contrast. The peacefulness of thesetting does not immediately lend itself to thesinister music that is used. The music sets thetone for the film, showing that it is ahorror, and also makes an otherwise boringopening sequence interesting. 6. The Car. The car is the main focus of the opening scene.We can see this because it is the only consistentthing throughout, as the locations changed, butin each of them, the car is driving through. This does not establish the main character, but itaids the establishment of character later on in thefilm, as the person getting out of the car wouldobviously be the character we would expect to bethe main character. The camera moves to follow the car, showing thatit is significant, as you might miss it at first. 7. Transitions. The cuts are very sharp, and show acompletely different location. This symbolisesanother of the main themes in the film:change. The sharp, jagged cuts to a differentlocation reflect the sharp change in the maincharacter to something completely different. 8. The use of lighting and reflections here are interestingand capture another of the films main themes: what isreal vs what is not. The actual cliff shows thereality, but the reflection in the sea represents illusionand what is not real. This is important to the film, asthe boy has an imaginary friend, and the maincharacter slowly loses his grip on reality. 9. Mise-En-Scene. The only real prop in this scene is the car. This is significantbecause the main focus of the film is the driver of that car.It is not apparent in this scene, but this scene helpsestablish that later on. The colour of the car, yellow, is significant more to the bookthan to the film, although it is still significant. Yellow is thecolour associated with fear (being yellow-bellied forexample), showing that this is a horror film and possiblythat the main character is nervous. It could also be seen as showing that the main character isquite an abstract character, as yellow cars are not verycommon, and neither are characters like Jack. The lighting is natural, signifying that everything is normalat this point in the film. The lack of actor in this first shot keeps the audienceinterested, as it makes the wonder why there has been nocharacter introduction, adding to the mystery of the piece. 10. Compared With Our Film. Our film does have some establishingshots, but they will not be of the countrysideor mountains and whatnot, itll be of creepystuff to show what our films going to beabout. Our opening is very, very different to this onein many ways. We will use a lot more close upsand different types of shots, plus we establishcharacters in ours. We also include some speech in ours, whichdoes not occur in this one.