The James Bond gun barrel sequence is an iconic opening to every official (EON Productions) James Bond film beginning with the first, Dr No in 1962. The sequence is credited to Maurice Binder, a famous title designer who worked on 14 Bond films. The look of the sequence was achieved with a pin hole camera shooting through a real gun barrel until the mid-1990s when it became computer-generated.

• In Dr No, ahead of Monty Norman’s Bond theme, during the white circles a beeping sound (reminiscent of the sound effects in the film’s nuclear-HQ climax) is heard. This sound can be heard in the gun barrel sequence during Die Another Day as well as during the track “Kiss of Life”, in homage.
• The first time that the full “James Bond Theme” was used with the sequence was in From Russia with Love. Dr No is also the only film to feature the circular motif at both the beginning and end (as a still shot).
• George Lazenby, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), is the only Bond who completely drops to one knee to fire the deadly shot. Also, it is the only film where the descending blood erases Bond’s image.
• Roger Moore was the only Bond to film the sequence twice, as his first two films reverted to a less widescreen format, while Panavision was brought back for The Spy Who Loved Me, necessitating a fifth version of the gun barrel.
• During the opening of Dr No and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the white dot stops roughly in the middle of the screen and the line “Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli Present” appears surrounding the dot. The text then wipes away and the dot continues on with the rest of the sequence.
• The main action of the first three films opens with the dot, white once more, simply disappearing – in the cases of From Russia with Love and Goldfinger it become smaller in jumps to the top right, effectively becoming the moon as these films open with a night shot. For all subsequent films, the opening shot materialises in the circle, which stops in the centre of the screen. With the exception of For Your Eyes Only (1981), where the whole frame suddenly disappears with a musical sting, the circle then grows larger until the moving shot it contains fills the screen.

See also:

• Gun barrel sequence