Understanding genre

The genre for our film is a mixture of drama and thriller. Examples of films similar to ours include Donnie Darko, Inception and Twin Peaks. Taking a look at the style and tone of these films, I have gathered a better understanding of their common features and as a whole, what makes them fit under this genre.

All of these films involve dream-like sequences that hugely inspired me with tone, narrative and style of Trust Fall. Donnie Darko explores the life of a young boy who experienced hallucinations/visions about the future. These visions often come in the form of a 6ft tall Rabbit called Frank. The involvement of a Rabbit in such a dark and mysterious story, makes the rabbit unsettling and creepy. As explored in a previous post, the rabbit
symbolises confrontation of fears and limitations. The rabbit is also associated with hallucinations/dreams due to its involvement in Alice in Wonderland. This inspired me to use the rabbit it Trust Fall as a guide throughout Anna's trip, similar to Donnie Darko and Alice in Wonderland.
Donnie Darko involves a lot of landscape shots which involve the sky, forests or the ocean. This creates a sense of clarity and tranquillity which sets the tone for a dream. These shots are then contrast with the shots which involve Frank which are often dark which suggests a nightmare rather than a dream. As Trust Fall deals with a dark and nightmarish trip, it would be good to involve both qualities to disorientate the audience into feeling like Anna does.


In Twin Peaks dream sequences, colour is an extremely important feature. Red, black and white are extremely prominent in these scenes, coming together to create an overbearing and hypnotic visual experience. The blacks are used to highlight everything else in room, making the reds glow even brighter. The room has no walls but a red curtain which closes the characters in this space. This creates a sense of fantasy as if they're part of a play and behind the red curtain. The flooring pattern involves black and white zig-zags which are a recurring feature within David Lynch films. This pattern is hard to focus on, again creating that disorientation which is similar to that created by an optical illusion. This plays with reality and fantasy, not knowing what's real and what's not.
The audio and body language of the characters is distorted and unpredictable, making it impossible to follow at times as you are never quite sure of what's going to happen next. This fits well with the dream genre as dreams/visions can't be controlled or predicted.

Inception uses distortion and manipulation of time and space in order to create surreal and unpredictable sequences. Defying gravity is a surreal, dreamlike quality which would work really well in our film as it holds dream like features and should cause the audience to question what is fantasy and what is reality. This could be achieved by distorting the picture and angles of the shot. Filming upside down or sideways would make it harder for the audience to concentrate on what's going on in the scene. This puts them at a similar position to the victim who has no control over what's going on.