"School Tower Shooting" can be regarded as a documentary showing the whole story of an incident. In the past, there are quite a lot of similar works for reference. This type of documentary has generally developed a fairly fixed grammar, with interviews and indications of the incident. As evidenced by the pictures and documents, "School Tower Shooting" certainly has these basic grammars. However, director Keith Maitland interspersed the film with interviews and animations, combined with the elements of feature films and documentaries, and cut out "School Tower Shooting". Different discourses, but still adhere to the real needs.
On August 1, 1966, after killing his wife and mother, Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old engineering student, mounted a sniper rifle on the campus tower and randomly shot passersby. At first, the sound of the guns sounded like fireworks, and people didn’t notice it. His life was being threatened, and he fled until he saw others killed and fell to the ground. The whole case ended after the police exchanged fire with the prisoner, resulting in 14 deaths and more serious injuries. Director Keith Maitland chose such a heavy theme and chose to cut from the eyes of the parties. "School Tower Shooting" reconstructed the whole shooting incident every second, using interviews and animation presentations to capture the fear and pain of the incident. , Dignified, the method of "School Tower Shooting" is not the first. In the past few years, the Israeli animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" is the real top masterpiece. However, "School Tower Shooting" is documentary in attitude. Emotions are expressed and combined, and it is a work worth seeing.
In most of the plot of "School Tower Shooting", the scene of the day is presented in animation. The film aims to establish the current tremor, interspersed with different characters such as students, police, and reporters, just like a drama, recreating the appearance and appearance of the time. go through. "School Tower Shooting" focused on several people from different fields, backgrounds, and lives. Their lives may have no overlap in the past, but because of this tragedy, there was a collision of fate. Some people died in this incident, and some lived. When they came down, some people watched the death of others, choosing to make a difference or hiding in fear.
A pregnant female student, Claire Wilson, was shot to the ground and her boyfriend was shot to death next to her. In the summer heat, she fell in the middle of the road and almost burned her limbs. , The people hiding around want to help, but they are afraid that they will become the next target as soon as they go out. A supermarket clerk, Allen Crum, originally just went to help a boy who was shot, but almost became the soul of the gun. After a series of encounters, he assisted the police to climb to the top of the tower and start a gun battle with the murderer. The experience of these two characters in "School Tower Shooting" is the most impressive, and it is enough to become the core focus of the whole movie. In this high-tempo tight situation, the film has excellent editing and visual visuals. With the matching, it successfully created the rumors of the shooting scene, which is not lost to the sensationalism of the drama movie. If this case is adapted into a drama movie, I am afraid that it will be completely lost to "School Tower Shooting."
The animation method used in "School Tower Shooting" is called "dynamic mask rotoscoping", which is a post-production animation drawing processing of real images, and the actual photos and videos are processed into color-blocked drawing sense, and the imaging is between the real Between the image and the traditional animation, it is like a sketch version of the real image. From this point of view, "School Tower Shooting" can actually be regarded as a feature film. Visually, actors must be found to perform the oral narration of the parties, and then transferred to animators to transform it into animated images. The images of "School Tower Shooting" will be such from time to time. The animation is integrated into the reality. For example, the parties in the animation will walk in the photos of the real campus, and the movie also has a few scenes of extremely stylized images. After the victim is hit by a bullet, the whole picture becomes red and the characters become white. The silhouette falls in slow motion, contrasting most of the gray-scale animation images in the movie to emphasize these important moments of drama. Even with such anti-realistic images, director Keith Maitland is still careful not to cross the real boundary too much.
The survivors at that time are about 60 or 70 years old, but when the deity is really brought out in the latter part of the movie, it can still be seen that the incident is still a dream, and the scars are still deep in the heart. The first two scenes of "The Shooting" repeated such wonderful events. While the audience's emotions were still tightly entangled, the film suddenly jumped to the current time and space in the third act, but did not clearly reveal the theme, which seemed weak. Of course, the plot of "School Tower Shooting" could not have been associated with the serious school gun problem in the United States today. However, the film did not pay much attention to this area, and it seemed that it did not focus on discussing the murderous manual machine. There is a later part of the film. The main focus is to explain that the authorities did not make clear reconstruction after injury at the time, leaving many survivors still alive in pain. The "School Tower Shooting" circled a big circle in the third act, and finally focused on the victims. On the subject, but compared with the plot in the previous paragraph, the meaning is unclear, anticlimactic and eclipsed a lot.
View more about Tower reviews
