The Shining Opening Title

The Shining Opening Title Sequence is personally one of my favourites because of it's simplicity, yet it manages to grasp the audiences attention and set the tone for the rest of the film.

When an audience enters a cinema, they are trying to find seats and settle down. Usually the audience will forget to get popcorn or a drink so they might leave their seat for a few minutes to get what they want or go to the toilet. Due to these reasons, a title sequence should never reveal much about the story or happen to quickly otherwise the audience might miss some of the film. Although people think that as the title sequence isn't focused on by the audience it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, that's not the case. The title sequence is a great way to set an atmosphere and music plays a key role as the audience can't avoid hearing sound.

For this title sequence, we start of moving across the lake and closing in on a bunch of trees, the camera then swoops to the right and for the rest of the time we follow a car. Obviously because the car is driving in the mountains, it would presumably be travelling a long distance and so we can't view all of the cars journey, so we just cut in and out of different moments in time.
Following a car doesn't sound very exciting, but it creates a whole load of questions such as:
Where is the car going?, who is in the car? where are they in the world?
These questions that aren't solved straight away are called enigmas because they get the audience thinking about a lot of solutions to these questions and creates tension between the audience.
Strangely, we see other cars heading the other direction, but no cars going the same way. This also creates an eery tension as we start to question why people are leaving; maybe it's dangerous? or maybe it's just a coincidence.

After a long journey we see a big Hostel cabin that we gather is a Ski Resort due to the snow and slopes around it. There isn't a lot of snow so this also tells us that it's spring or summer which probably explains the lack of business and cars, but then we start to wonder why they are heading out to a Ski Resort in the summer time.

The music is extremely unnerving as it's in a low key and it's very negative. This music indicates to the audience that the film is going to be scary or at least thrilling, so before the film has even started, the audience can already feel tense and nervous.

The only part that I didn't feel worked well was that the credits were in a light blue colour which was the same colour as the sky so the words almost disappeared towards the top. The important names were big and bold which made people notice they were there, but the colour wasn't a great choice.