View image: Waking into a nightmare. From Brad Damare, New Orleans, LA: "Dawn of the Dead" opens with an close-up of one of the lead characters, asleep against a blood-red carpeted wall. She seems both alone and surrounded by the…
View image: What are we looking at/for? View image: Find one difference in this picture. From Jeremy Mathews, The Salt Shaker Magazine, Salt Lake City, UT: It may be a recent film, but I don't think it's too early to…
View image From Girish Shambu, Buffalo, NY: "Flowers of Shanghai" (1998), by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien, has an opening shot that lasts — I kid you not — eight minutes! Jazz bassist Marcus Miller once said about James Brown’s music…
View image From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX: Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film's first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down…
Here goes. For the time being, I'm just going to offer up the answers to the Opening Shots Pop Quiz, without further elaboration or analysis in most cases -- because these shots are so great they deserve full Opening Shots…
View image View image View image It starts in the dark with a swirl of strings and then a blast of brass as the screen explodes into vivid neon pink. No movie has ever announced itself with a more sexually…
View image View image From Leonard Maltin: The one that first comes to mind is from a film I fell in love with thirty-some years ago, "Scarecrow," directed by Jerry Schatzberg and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. I revisited it when…
"I am your host! Und sagen..." Here they are, eleven of the most famous opening shots in movie history, plus a bonus that I threw in just because I like it. Prepare to smack your head and say, "D'oh! I…
Movies 101: Opening Shots Project Introduction
I still have plenty of excellent Opening Shots submissions to edit and post -- and I'm doing my best to get frame grabs to accompany them whenever I can. (Quiz answers coming soon, too.) To no one's surprise, "Star Wars"…