Wallander

Wallander

Firewall, 7th December 2008, BBC1

In this opening sequence all the way through a lot of things are shown which makes the audience ask questions about what is going and who the characters are and what exactly has happened and where they are.

Cinematography

In this first shot we have an extreme shot which is also an establishing shot for where the next few shots will be based on this costal part of a country and off in the distance we can see a small white car. This instantly makes the audience start to think of where this could be; what could have happened; why it has happened and who has done it. As the shot helicopters over we see two characters walking away from the car before we cut to this shot below of a two shot of both the characters.

Mies-En-Scene

Looking at the picture of the two characters (above) we can see they are quite dark characters and we get this just from their costumes as they are both wearing dark jackets one of them being leather which is usually worn by biker groups and the type of people who are quite gruff and horrible. The character on the left also has some red hair which connotes death and violence as well as anger meaning that this character specifically must be the leader of the two and the more angry violent type of character.

Looking at the back of both the characters hair we can see that the left character is not as powerful or significant as the character on the right as the character on the right is taller in the frame and has all of these other things about her characters costume as the character on the left seems very plain and normal with normal brown hair and a black hoody.

Editing

In the Image below you can see some of the editing that happens which is a lot of cuts that mainly in this scene switch from the back of the girls or the front of the girls to the male character in the car but once the edits from inside the car happen all of the shots switch back and forth between the female characters and the male character in the car as it is doing this to show what these two characters have done and this leaves an impressions on the audience of what these two characters are like, so within this opening sequence the audience is able to identify which characters are the bad characters and which character is the victim, but with this completely silent shot apart from the ambient sounds and the non-diegetic builds in the score the audience will always have one question and that is what happened to these two characters to make them kill this man or did they do it out of self defense?

Sound
In the intro scene the sounds are very non-diegetic at first before the first cut happens as there is a volume increase in the music that is being played, along with the surrounding ambiance of the wind and the sea, which is also a build up to the cut and when the cut happens everything becomes diegetic with the sound of the two female characters walking and the surrounding ambient sounds. but there is nothing that is non-diegetic until the point of when the female character drops the knife. This is done to give a sense of isolation, that these characters are the only people around which is also shown with their hyperbolic breathing sounds.