This opening sequence begins with a variety of shot of an American community. These shots show different types of people, all walks of life, going about their own lives. Meanwhile the voice over of Casey Affleck talks to the audience about his views on community, knowing who you are, family, things he considers very important in life. During his voice over music of a piano symphony is playing quite calmly and in the background. The images shown the screen along with the music and voice over create quite a thoughtful state of mind for the audience and captivates them into watching the film.
The character giving the voice over I assume is the protagonist and the audience actually learns a lot about him in this opening sequence. A shot of the 'New Testament Church of God' is shown which tells us the community are religious and that is a key factor in their lives. This is also shown when the narrator says "When I was young I asked my priest", which tells us he is a practising Christian. The audience gets to see the narrator walk through his town, looking and talking to people, suggesting he is well known and well liked within his community. We see he is a young man probably in his early 20's. In his voice over he reveals "I've lived on this block my whole life, most of these people have" this contributes the sense of congregation and in my opinion he appears to be the voice of the people of his community. He also says "When your job is to look for people who are missing" this suggests he could be part of the police or perhaps he is voluntarily searching for a little girl who has gone missing.
After the sequence of his voice over and series of shot of people we see a poster of a missing girl and police in the area, and what appears to be the little girl's mother giving an interview to the police, surrounded by loads of people and cameras.
This whole opening sequence is very different to the others I have looked at, although there is a sense of mystery of who this protagonist is and where the little girl has gone missing, a lot of information is revealed either through the voice over or what is shown on the screen. In my opinion the community look relatively poor in wealth, however rich in love and this is why everyone looks concerned and upset about the disappearance of the girl.
The way the voice over and variety of shots are presented is through a montage which was able to show all these images in a short amount of time. The montage worked really well in introducing the storyline and characters and themes.
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