Thin Blue Line Analysis

This documentary I watched, titled "Thin Blue Line," is about an unknown man that shoots and kills a police officer during a traffic stop, but a man named David gets convicted anyways. It includes many different ways of visual words and images to give the documentary suspense and even sometimes a sense of clues as to who the murderer might be. For example, one of the scenes in the film shows a map of the area where the murder happened with all of the street names, buildings, etc. and then slowly fades into an areal view of the actual spot in real life. This gives the viewer a good sense of what the area looks like in perspective of where places are located and what the area would look like to be there in real life. Another example of these dramatic scenes made by the producers is when the film talks about the murder for one of the first times. The camera does a close up shot of some words like "murder," "death," and "witness." This gives the watcher a feeling that this is a very mysterious event that has happened in the town and that all of these things have occurred.

Not only do the producers create these senses with words, but with images as well. For example, there were a couple scenes of the camera showing sketches of the courtroom while some of the suspects were on trial for the murder. I feel like showing this helps lets the viewer get a sense of how dramatic and serious this trial was by showing the different images from the room. There are many other times when images or short clips are used to portray a sense of intensity and drama. These would be things like close up shots of police sirens, the barrel of a gun, and a shot from the ground up of the electric chair. Two important and very interesting clips, in my opinion, is when the camera does close ups of a couple suspect cars, including the lights and license plate, to show what kind of car may have been involved with the murder of. The other important clip is one being a close up of the cassette tape during the interview with David. It shows the tape in the middle of the cassette just spin over and over while they talk. I feel like this also helps the reader understand the intensity of the interview and situation as a whole.  Overall, I think that the producers of this documentary did a very good job at portraying different words and images to help depict the feeling of the horrific event that took place in Texas.