![]() It made the material accessible to a whole new audience, and another generation.” It gave the events of 1966 a currency, immediacy, and intimacy. The animation achieved everything I’d always wanted my writing to achieve, but hadn’t. ![]() ![]() I’ll never forget the day he first showed me some of the footage on a handheld device, because I started crying in the middle of the restaurant. But I also knew that he was a brilliant filmmaker with a vision. “I worried it might trivialize the material. “When Keith first told me that he wanted to animate his documentary, I didn’t really get it,” says Colloff, an executive editor at Texas Monthly. Colloff was involved at times as an executive producer, but initially, she was trepidatious about the project he envisioned, she says. The “light bulb” moment for Maitland came when he read “96 Minutes, ” the exhaustive 2006 Texas Monthly oral history of the clock tower shooting written by Pamela Colloff. Rotoscoping enabled Maitland to emphasize small details - stacks of the best-selling In Cold Blood at the bookstore, for example - and dramatize the consuming hysteria that spread as the event unfolded. The film avoids the “talking head” style of documentary production by employing a mixture of black-and-white archival footage and rotoscoping, a process in which animators trace over live images - a technique popularized by the dean of Austin filmmakers, Richard Linklater, in his ground-breaking 2001 movie Waking Life. And while the documentary chronicles the carnage, it’s the story of the victims, heroes, and survivors that shines. Tower is a powerful, haunting depiction of the clock tower shooting that unfolds as if the audience is experiencing the incident in real-time. Maitland, a filmmaker, channelled his curiosity into Tower, a documentary which opened at New York’s Film Forum on October 12, and will roll out across the country in the coming months. I wanted to understand what happens when a safe place is terrorized and forever changed.” “I was shocked to find out there was no acknowledgment of it, no memorial, no mention of it the campus literature,” Maitland, now 40, tells The Trace.“When I asked, the tour guide told me they weren’t suppose to talk about it. It was the first high-profile mass shooting on a college campus in modern American history - and an event deeply ingrained in the state’s identity. From his outpost, Charles Whitman fatally shot 14 people, including a pregnant woman’s unborn child, before being killed by police. On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, an engineering student and former marine, holed up in the tower with a rifle. He was most surprised about what he didn’t learn that day: anything about the terrible history of the 307-foot Beaux-art style clock tower that looms over the state’s flagship school. Twenty years ago, as an incoming freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, Keith Maitland was given a tour of his new campus.
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