Shameless Opening Credits/Title Sequence

I watched the Shameless opening credits (series 5) and this is what I have annotated about it.

Enigmas
- People running from shop, could suggest stealing. Audience might want them to be caught/punished or just find out who they are.
- Fire, small child buring things in a fire could suggest danger and attract the audience because they might fear for him or want to know why he is doing it. Also somethign on the stove is burning and we might wonder if this could lead to more e.g. house fire.
- Gun, we might want to know why the young lad is being held a gun point. We will want to know what he has done, why he did it and how he is going to be punished (killed, wounded e.t.c).
- Fight, again similar to the gun problem we want to know why a large fight has broken out in the pub and what will become of it.
- Police, we see several police standing around and then see a car driving off quickly with it lights and sirens on we want to know why it is doing this!

Editing
- The editing is all very fast and there are no transitions in between the shots to soften the cuts this makes the visual effect very fast and sharp. I would say personally that they have chosen to use editing like this to suggest that the program is very fast moving and sharp and prehaps they suggest danger like how quickly things can spiral out of control. E.g. The fight, the fires, the boy being held a gun point e.t.c. Many of these situations probably started off as calm, quiet situations but very rapidly became dangerous and threataning. Another possible reason for the fast editing could be to simulate a heartbeat as when we get in trouble or get scared we produce adrenalin and our hearts begin to work harder and these quick cuts could be respresenting there/our heartbeat as they get in dangerous situations.

Soundtrack
- The music in background (presumably non-diegetic) has been clevely selected and sounds alot like emergency service sirens the music is very repetitiv (again like sirens)and helps along with the editing suggest that these program is going to include things that we as the audience might consider 'taboo' and could attract the audience to want to watch as we will be able to witness things that we probably don't see in our every day lifes.
- There is also a voice over from the main character of the show and despite a lot of things happening in the background we are still able to focus on his voice and what he is saying and I think it is important that we can do this. Allthough if this character was real and we saw him in real life we would probably completely ignore what he is saying as we would probably just assume he is 'rambling' on about nothing. However what he is saying is important because it helps us get to know the characters (along with the visual appearance we have in thh background). He talks about how 'pikeys' have it better than him and are able to leave a mess where ever they want without punishment and complains that his life is unfair and that all his family does is moan to him. He then goes on to talk about how drugs and alcohol are a good invention because they can releive this 'stress' he is going through by getting him drunk or drugged up. We can presume that he is a jobless father who dosen't pay tax, recieves benefits and considers himself poverty and loses no pride in taking from others all from the things he says in the space of just over one minute.

Mise en scene
- The mise en scene is particually clever in shameless and very well thought out the characters they are trying to create are prehaps people who have little money and either have little wage jobs or no jobs at all and spend the little money they have on alcohol and drugs. We see what we might assume to be lower class housing/flat estates and alot of the streets are filled with people even at day time, and being as we assume this to be a small village we would usually not see many people in the day being as they would be at school or at work. The clothes they are wearing we might presume are cheap and not branded or of high quality we can say this because we don't see anyone wearing suits, ties or smart shoes, there clothes look damaged or dirty and don't quite seem to fit properly (we might think that the reason for them not fitting properly is because they are 'hand me downs' clothes past from one sibling to another to save money buy not having to buy new clothes for the other child(ren). Also we see alot of pint glasses/wine glasses and ash trays lying around because stereotypically we might think that these people are all lower class and take drugs and smoke and the creators have decided to be very over the top in this way and made sure almost everyone fits up to their stereotypes so the audience can see instantly what type of character they are.


"Shameless" — Series five opening titles.

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