Trading places

This post focuses on the opening of Trading Places (2003), starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykord. The Mise-en-scene in the opening helps the audience to see the huge difference in quality of life between rich and poor people, it does this by showing the poor working early in the morning while the rich man recieves breakfast in bed. In regards to the editing we see a lot of cuts from the poor environment to the rich environment this could be seen as a montage and it again helps to show the difference in life. We hear the rich man listening to classical music, which is a convention of rich people. (to listen to classical music). We also see a high angle shot of two rich men looking down at Eddie Murphy, at the same time we see a point-of-view shot of Eddie Murphy looking up at the men, this shot was used to show us the way the rich see the poor, in other words they look down on them.Futhurmore it also shows us that poor people look up to the rich.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s74qrOyJJv4&feature=related This is a short clip from the openeing.

Identity

The first opening sequence i will talk about is from a film called identity.
In this opening we see a lot of pans and tracking shots of pieces of paper this shows us that the paper is of importance. We also see close-ups of the paper, the reason this was done was to allow the audience to see whats on the paper and this again stresses there importance. At one point we see that a tape recorder was the only thing in focus, this tells me that this tape recorder/or what is on the tape recorder will have some relevance later on in the story. The mise-en-scene also allows the audience to see the words on the paper and the pictures aswell, in the pictures we see various people in jail, because we are shown these pictures it could mean that we will find out about the story of these characters. A lot of the sound is diegetic which makes the opening seem more real.
link to the opening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMC4HVbcHo4&feature=related