What do I think? I don't really know, but I intend to ask my friend to see if he can shed any light on it.
If I was to hazard a guess, and this really is a guess, I would say that the movie opens with Saruman staring into the Palantir, searching Middle Earth for the remains of the Fellowship, the camera zooms into the Palantir and seemlessly merges with a scene where we are high in the sky at a great height over the empty plains and suddenly start to drop downward till we zoom in on 3 little specks which grow to become the recognisable figures of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, the three hunters.