The School of Communication and Media Presents a New Documentary Film CRITICAL INCIDENT CRITICAL RESPONSE

A First-Hand Look at How First Responders React to a Critical Incident

On Wednesday May 13th at the Memorial Auditorium, The School of Communication and Media premiered Critical Incident Critical Response, a new documentary film that chronicles first responders reacting to a critical incident in real time.

The “Incident” was a planned military and police coordinated training procedure held at Liberty Middle School in West Orange, New Jersey, where School of Communication and Media Television Digital and Media students helped to vividly capture the mock drill on camera.  Local and state police, including the New Jersey S.W.A.T. unit, hovering helicopters and blaring sirens, responded to the simulated active shooters who had infiltrated the school.  “Despite it being a drill,” says Patricia Piroh, the executive producer of the film and the associate director of Broadcast and Digital Media Operations within the College of the Arts, “it felt extremely realistic.”

The middle school staff and teachers, students, ambulance teams, and first responders worked together to simulate the emergency incident.  To create a more powerful, real-life setting, make-up artists rendered simulated wounds on students, and volunteer actors portrayed parents anxiously standing outside the school waiting for news.  Rubber bullets were shot out of functional firearms, and officers wore TASER eye-glass cameras to record footage of their every move.

The film’s producer Krystal Acosta, who is also the production coordinator of Broadcast and Digital Media Operations, described the preparations of the filming “as precise, where we planned the filming sequences for each of our multiple cameras from beginning to end.”  Students worked furiously logging scenes, keeping track of the action and learning first hand about the rigors of filming live, fast-paced sequences for a documentary film.  To fully prepare the twenty-five students who participated in the intensive twelve hour filming, a one-credit course, taught by Professor Larry J. Londino, was given during the previous summer.  “The project was an incredibly positive learning opportunity for our students, they had first-hand experience from producing and shooting the film from start to finish” says Acosta.

The film project was an initiative of the West Orange Police Department, where Lieutenant John Morella spearheaded the project.  “It came from a crucial need to train our police department, and it was the first of its kind in the state, and likely in the nation,” says Lt. Morella, who received a $140,000 grant for the project from the Department of Homeland Security.

By analyzing the footage shot by the School’s students, the GPS data from equipment and cameras outfitted by Picatinny Arsenal, and other footage taken by government cameras, “officers and police departments will learn greatly from this experience, improving training procedures from this life-like situation,” says Lieutenant Rich McDonald, a training coordinator at the West Orange Police Department.

The film’s poignant narration was presented by retired United States Navy veteran and NASA astronaut Captain Mark Kelly, spouse of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona.  Kelly is the son of two retired police officers and was raised in West Orange New Jersey, and has a close connection to the project as a West Orange native.

All methodical preparations and premeditated planning were meant to give responding officers the chance to learn and react within a real-life, though simulated, event much like the School’s Television and Digital Media students who had a first-hand learning experience as part of this unique production team.

It was the largest and most comprehensive active shooter drill conducted in the US and the School of Communication and Media is proud to have worked alongside federal and local law enforcement in order to produce this important work.

Image Gallery

Attached Media

• A still of Liberty Middle School, where the drill was enacted in the film “Critical Incident Critical Response”