The Best Of Me - Opening 2 Minutes

The opening shot of the film is a long shot above the sea which has been filmed on a helicopter to create this affect and the camera is moving towards an oil rig of some sort and pans around it and zooms in towards it so that we can identify that there are people working on it. By having this shot as the opening scene means it is an establishing shot as we are made aware of where the film is going to be set. We then see close up shots of a characters face working. This is usually done to introduce the main character or an important character.

We then see a high angle shot, which shows what the character is doing and also shows the choppy sea below. This shows the danger that the character could face due to his job. We can therefore assume that his job may have an affect on him later on in the film.

Using a medium shot, the character is then shown placing a large amount of money into an envelope and posting it into a mail box. This could mean that the character has family at home that he needs to support and so therefore, the money he earns from working, he sends home.


A medium shot is then used to focus in on the male characters facial expression, and we see him just looking past the camera. By getting the character to look just past the lens, we, as the audience, know that he is looking at something. This means that when we get a long shot of the stars in the sky, in the next scene, we know what the character was looking at. In the scene after, we have an over the shoulder shot of a lady also looking up at the stars. This means that there must be some sort of link between the two of them, although we are not told that, we assume this by the way the scene has been filmed.

The clothing that the male character is wearing, tells us that he is at work, which we can also see in the way he is acting. We also know that he is not a very rich man due to what he is wearing because stereotypically, we expect business men who are very wealthy to be wearing suits, so we know that he is from the working class.

The last section of the opening scene, shows us as the audience that this is a romantic film as we have both male and female characters.