One of the best put together documentaries I've seen in recent memory. Certainly the most visually striking since Waltz With Bashir. The way it blends archival footage and rotoscope animation is unique and effective.
It won't be like any documentary you see so check it out!
August 1st, 1966. The famous belltower sniper massacre in Austin, Tx. Tower uses the rotoscoping animation techniques developed in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly to support a documentary revisiting the events of that day, minute by minute, using the accounts of the people who lived it as a basis for its recreation. Why animation? I think it has several effects. The first is that it takes the edge off the potential for sensationalism, going abstract in moments of violence. It also allows the viewer to better accept the recreation; though actors have been painted over, we're not seeing actors nor making value judgements on the casting, performance, etc. The talking heads material is done by the actors as the participants' younger selves, which creates an immediacy to the accounts. It also somehow creates suspense when it becomes clear not all the talking heads are still with us, as reality starts to blink into being and animation progressively drops out. Once we're discussing the aftermath, it thus becomes much more like a classic documentary, though certainly one that pulls at the heart strings. Tower is about the people who lived through the events - victims, police, heroes, bystanders - and not about the killer. We don't know what was going on with him, and perhaps we shouldn't care. It's a gap in the film, but one we can fill with our understanding of mass (school) shootings, if such understanding is possible even now. These events were Patient Zero for an epidemic to come.
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Advent
One of the best put together documentaries I've seen in recent memory. Certainly the most visually striking since Waltz With Bashir. The way it blends archival footage and rotoscope animation is unique and effective.It won't be like any documentary you see so check it out!
Siskoid
August 1st, 1966. The famous belltower sniper massacre in Austin, Tx. Tower uses the rotoscoping animation techniques developed in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly to support a documentary revisiting the events of that day, minute by minute, using the accounts of the people who lived it as a basis for its recreation. Why animation? I think it has several effects. The first is that it takes the edge off the potential for sensationalism, going abstract in moments of violence. It also allows the viewer to better accept the recreation; though actors have been painted over, we're not seeing actors nor making value judgements on the casting, performance, etc. The talking heads material is done by the actors as the participants' younger selves, which creates an immediacy to the accounts. It also somehow creates suspense when it becomes clear not all the talking heads are still with us, as reality starts to blink into being and animation progressively drops out. Once we're discussing the aftermath, it thus becomes much more like a classic documentary, though certainly one that pulls at the heart strings. Tower is about the people who lived through the events - victims, police, heroes, bystanders - and not about the killer. We don't know what was going on with him, and perhaps we shouldn't care. It's a gap in the film, but one we can fill with our understanding of mass (school) shootings, if such understanding is possible even now. These events were Patient Zero for an epidemic to come.Armoreska
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