The slow-motion film is based on true events and shows the last known moments of award-winning photographer David Gilkey in Afghanistan and his colleague Zabihullah Tamanna. Gilkey sits inside a vehicle, which is turned upside down and gets hit by a massive impact. Then the film switches to real-time. The film uses Gilkey’s original voice from an interview he once gave about the purpose of being a journalist.

The film ends with charts remembering David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna and leads to our open platform.

David Gilkey was a famous US-photographer, who has been killed while reporting in Afghanistan. His death was not caused by a random attack, but terrorists deliberately killed him and his colleague in a targeted attack. It is unsure whether he was killed by the sole impact or by the burns caused by a rocket-propelled grenade, which generates lots of heat.

David Gilkey and his colleague Zabihullah Tamanna are two of over 100 reporters, who have been killed in a targeted attack since 2016.

All elements were hand-crafted and later implemented into a 3D-environment via photogrammetry. It was important to us, to apply a newspaper texture onto the models and the stage we prepared, as we are dealing with reporters and the newspaper is the main medium of journalism.

Once all data was fed into the 3D environment, we rigged the body and started animating. As this film is based on true events, we had to stick to facts. We used slow-motion animation to stress Gilkey’s subtle facial expression and to capture this moment of realization that his world and life has turned upside down – both literally and figuratively speaking.