Opening scene in '10 Things I Hate About You' - Analysis

                Analysis of the opening scene in '10 Things I Hate About You'

I analysed the first 2 minutes of the opening scene of 10 things I hate about you. The scene starts off with non diegetic music playing in the background with the song 'One Week' by 'The Barenaked Ladies' . From this we know that it is going to be a film directed at a teenage/young adult audience seeing as this band was very big with teenagers and young people at that specific time. Another reason we can tell that it is a teen film is because the credits are in a graffiti font which would be stereotypical to teenagers seeing as most people, if they were to see graffiti in the street, they would assume a teenager has done it.

We then see an establishing shot of the city and then turns around to show the road with kids on their way to school. A car with the roof down pulls up with four blonde 'Barbie girls' dancing to the song. This shows that the non diegetic music has turned into diegetic music playing on the radio. Their facial expressions show that they are happy and having a good time and do not care if other people can see what they are doing. Their costumes show them to be typical pretty girls with blonde long hair, lipstick and eye-liner and girly t-shirts with flowers printed on them and this also shows that they are the popular ones of the school. They have their hair in bunches so it shows they have put time and effort into their hair.

A rusty old looking orange car pulls up next to them, driven by a girl wearing a leather jacket and her hair tied back with no make up.  This shows that she is very laid back about the way she looks and doesn't want to be classed as a pretty girl. You can also tell this because the song switches to her radio and the song playing is 'Bad Reputation' by' Joan Jett and the Black-hearts .If you listen to the lyrics of the song its saying how she doesn't give a damn about her bad reputation. This song has been included to reflect her personality. The roof of her car is closed. this can represent that she is a closed up and shy.

Facial expressions shows that she doesn't like the girls in the car next to her and even gets annoyed at just looking at them, we see a close up of her face which shows her turning away with an uninterested expression. This is also the case for the girls in the other car with their facial expressions showing that they also do not like her with a medium close up to ensure that they get all of the girls in the shot. You can also see the two girls in the back are leaning out from their normal seating position to ensure that they are in the shot.

We then see an establishing shot of the school to show this is the main setting and location of the film.

I analysed this scene because I knew it was a rom-com and had a target audience similar to mine. Mine will be aimed at teenagers and above and the character is set on a young 20 year old man whereas, this film revolves around teenagers at school and mine revolves around a working man. One thing I did like about the video was the font. i would like to make my font not as graffiti-like as the font in the video but still have it in a cartoony style.