As the two pranksters are hauled aboard one of the spotter boats, Hooper checks in with Brody on the walkie talkie. Right after his line (‘Did everybody get out of the water all right?’) there is a cut to a young woman on the beach. The sea is on the left of the frame, the land on the right, in a reverse composition of earlier shots. The sand is strewn with pebbles and clumps of seaweed (like the one that the first victim’s severed arm was discovered in). The beach is clearly less attractive to tourists, only a few of whom can be seen in the background. In the centre of the frame there is an artist’s easel, at which the woman has been painting. It makes perfect sense that she should be the one to see the shark, as her eye has been trained on the sea in an attempt to capture it on canvas.As she moves closer towards us, a look of disbelieving horror forming on her face, we get a reverse shot of the mouth of the pond. We can see the crowd of bathers on the other side of the causeway, and the green-roofed bandstand provides a further point of reference to give us our bearings. The woman steps into the frame, obscuring a couple of kids wrapped in yellow towels sitting on the rocks. The colour subliminally alerts us to the approaching danger, just as the first growling notes of the score tell us that what we are looking at over the woman’s shoulder is our first recognisable glimpse of the shark: a large dorsal fin and the smaller tip of a tail moving through the water. Over the beach PA system we hear a man informing the bathers that the earlier sighting was a practical joke. There is a cut to a lower angle of the woman in profile as she gives a name to the threat in a stuttering scream of the single word, ‘Sh- shark!’
