Blog/Diary Assignment 2

The Fifth Estate
Strangers in Paradise

Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) is an online virtual world. Registers can create “their own “avatar”—a user’s idealized persona that embodies the physique and personality of his or her dreams”. In this episode, Hana Gartner tells two stories about 2 women who live in the real world as well as the virtual cyberspace. Janet is divorced mother, and Carolyn is a housewife and mother of four. Both of them meet their lovers Dutch and Elliott on Second Life, even get married with them. Janet and Carolyn think that this is just virtual world and there is no actual touching, so they never think it is cheating for their families. But Dutch’s wife and Carolyn’s husband don’t think so. They think if someone’s life in the real world is sating in the front of a computer 17 hours per day, her/his life is in the cyberspace. I can image before this doc was shot, the film crew did a lot of preparation work, so we can see Carolyn’s four youth children on the screen. In addition, some setup is set up in this episode. For example, Carolyn is packing for her meeting with her lover in London, and Janet and Dutch are spinning along the highway on a motorcycle.


The Thin Blue Line

This documentary makes me recall a film named The Shawshank Redemption, for they describe similar plots. There is no enough evidence, but an innocent person becomes an offender, and the judicial system gets a problem. From The Thin Blue Line I figure out two things. Firstly, compare with a hug system such as a system of law courts, one single person can be so insignificant; secondly, be careful to chose your friends. To illustrate, Randall Adams knows David Harris who has an arsenal, and he often takes out the gun and shots with any purpose; however, Randall Adams still intermingles with the extremely dangerous gangster. I also learn a lot from the doc. I understand that if you are a smart filmmaker, you can make use of many things to tell your story. In this doc an ashtray is used to show that Randall Adams is so anxious in the calaboose, and a falling cup on the ground with drink can make you imagine that the police officer is falling down and bleeding.


TVOntario

Wipe Out
These are the stories of three young men living with brain injuries. They describe how they got brain injuries and their feeling during those serious accidents. This program wants to tell a truth to viewers: there many people are crazy about the extreme sport in Canadian, and it’s the leading cause of death and disability among sporters. It’s too dangerous so that “more than 100.000 Canadians are brain injured each year” like other docs, they only disclose this phenomenon, but it’s hard to find an effective way to stop it. Because this program describes extreme sports, in the postproduction it makes every shot very short so that we can imagine that some accidents happen so quickly. Of course, it’s a kind of film style.

LEo