Analysis of opening 2 minutes of The Proposal

The Proposal is a romantic comedy made in 2009.

• The film starts with the producers logos, Touchstone and Mandeville Films.

• The non-digetic music used in the opening scene is cheery and upbeat which shows us that the genre is going to be happy or funny and steers us away from horror or sci-fi genres. The first scene is someone walking through a forest which could be seen as quite scary but the music makes us have a different view on the genre of the film.

• The shot then pans out to show that the forest is just on a screen and we see a woman exercising and reading manuscripts. The fact that she is watching a forest shows that she wants to be in nature and probably lives in the city. We see this when the shot keeps panning out and we see buildings in the window.
  
• The woman seems to be organised and determined because she is on time and lives a healthy lifestyle.

• We then get introduced to her opposite, the male lead. The diegetic sound of a beeping car wakes him up which carries on the idea of them both living in a big city. He is late from waking up so he is the opposite to the female lead who is organised. This already shows us that these two characters will end up not getting on, because they are totally different. In addition, the male lead swears whilst the female remains professional.

• The females kitchen is also very tidy, whilst the male's home is messy with magazines lying around. This goes with gender stereotypes where women are the more domestic gender. The kitchen also looks very expensive which shows that she is successful.

• We then get our first taste of what city this is set in as we see busy streets with yellow taxis, signifying that we are in New York. This fits with the romantic comedy cliché as they are usually set in a big city.

• Meanwhile, the intertext is shown over the action but near the bottom so we are not distracted from the story that is forming.

• The male lead goes into a coffee shop and we see that a girl in the shop is flirting with him and obviously thinks he is attractive as we see later when the girl has written her number on the cup.

• The camera shot follows the characters around showing how fast moving the city is and how they must rush to catch up. It is effective because we are following their lives.

• We see that both of the people work in a publishing house, this shows that they work together and that is how the two characters meet. The male lead is rushing about with two coffee's. 

• The male bumps into someone spilling a coffee, he shouts 'sweet jesus' which shows that he is probably stressed and his job is very demanding.

• When the female comes in, it it obvious that many people do not like her or are scared of her as a people steer clear of her path and there are messages sent around saying "It's here." There is diegetic sounds of the messages popping up to make the mood lighthearted.

• Finally, we see how the two characters know each other, the male being the females secretary, which challenges gender stereotypes as usually the men are the boss and the women being the secretaries. 
  

• The two characters are polar opposites and the male seems to want to have a real conversation with the female but she seems to distracted by her work, which foreshadows that later on she may look away from her work and see that she likes the man. The male seems clumsy, awkward and perhaps unlucky, whilst the females collected, determined and serious.

This is an effective opening as we can clearly see the characters' personality, for our film we should use some of these techniques to show the audience what our characters are like and how they represent different social groups.