Golden Compass opening analysis:

The film starts with golden dust lightly drifting across a black screen over the golden words ‘new line cinema presents’ the font is a smart old looking font to show the old fashioned era that the film is set in. The golden dust continues to drift across the screen as different credits fade in and out. Eventually the words ‘the golden compass’ in that same old fashioned font, begin to form out of the golden dust. Golden particles fill the screen and fade into a shot of the universe. As the galaxies drift into shot, the scene fades into a shot of Oxford University, England. Its night and the campus buildings on both sides of the street are lit by a golden glow bringing more attention to the golden lights that frequently feature in the film.  The camera pans down the street to a rip in the fabric of the universe. The camera looks through the transparent rip and we see a glimpse of an identical universe except that there is much more saturation and more of the golden glow. The camera pans around to show that the buildings are Oxford University.  A low angle shot of a man with a snow leopard coming up from one street and stopping at the corner where a street from the left meets a street going upwards. There’s a close up of the man’s face as he smiles. The background is blurred so all our focus is on the man’s face, showing us he’s a main character because he is the first real person we see in the film. He turns to the left as he immediately fades out and is replaced with a burst of golden dust that takes over the screen. The dust forms into images that to go with the narrative. Each image appears out of the dust and disintegrates back into the dust one after the other. No two images appear at the same time.  The dust eventually forms into a golden compass except for the multiple images that go around the edge of the compass. A close up shows a needle of the compass settling on one of the images (a snake) then moving to another (out of shot). The compass appears to be operated by the golden particles. And extreme close up shows us one of the images in great detail (a young woman). The compass fades out and out of the Dust we see a large old fashioned Edwardian style building. The compass fades back in rotating around the image of a baby.