The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight

The scene starts as we are able to see a series of visual effects to draw the audience into the story, and make them pay attention to the start of the movie.
As the scene begins, the camera zooms slowly into a glass filled sky scraper; this gives the connotations of a big city, and gives the audience an insight into the setting of the rest of the movie. The camera continues to zoom slowly into the skyscraper; from there we are able to see one of the many glass windows blown away from an antagonist on the inside of the building. This again creates narrative enigma, just as in the opening of No County for Old Men, as the audience are left to wonder who the antagonist is, why he has a mask and why he is carrying a dangerous weapon (features that are very common in the genre of the thriller)
From this shot of the broken window, we see a straight cut to another member of the antagonist gang standing in the middle of the pavement, holding the prop of a clown mask in his hand, we are again left to wonder why the man does not have his mask on, and why we should be so interested in this particular character. Yet, none of the plot to the main storyline is revealed during this. The camera also pays particular interest to the clown mask prop that the character is holding, and the audience are left wondering why this particular clown mask is so interesting.
Throughout the clip we can hear the ambient sound of the hustle and bustle of usual city life, again giving the audience an insight to the setting in which the film is going to be set, it also gives the antagonists in the clip the connotations of braveness as they are willing to undertake what we believe to be a serious crime in pure daylight in an extremely busy city centre.

(I was unable to embed the video into my blog as the embedding was disabled by request on the YouTube website however, the link for the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OYBEquZ_j0&feature=related )