Lincoln in the 21st Century

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A historian touches the past with the help of Stan Winston''s new digital special effects house in Ghosts of the Library, a permanent show in the $150 million Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which opened this past April in Springfield, Ill.
Photos by Gary Krueger.

After 20+ years of planning and six years of development, design, and construction, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has finally opened this spring in Springfield, Ill. But this is not your typical presidential library/museum — a repository of presidential papers administered by the National Archives. To begin with, it is twice as big as any previous presidential complex, and it houses two theaters and several video presentations and interactive displays, along with an immersive journey through Lincoln's life.

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA) and the Capital Development Board oversee this mostly state-funded complex. Although the Lincoln Presidential Library is a traditional archive, housing the largest collection of Lincoln's pre-presidential papers in the country and more than 47,000 Lincoln artifacts, the Lincoln Presidential Museum is an “innovative blend of scholarship and showmanship,” according to Bob Rogers, founder and CEO of BRC Imagination Arts.

The IHPA chose BRC Imagination Arts, a Burbank, Calif.-based exhibit and show design company, over a handful of top museum design firms to create a visitor experience for the new museum. “We certainly have some glass cases and flat images on the wall,” says Rogers, “but that's just a start. Using advanced technologies, special effects, and world-class storytelling, yet maintaining rigorous standards of scholarship, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum presents a fully immersive theatrical experience.”

According to show producer/director Tony Mitchell of BRC, “There are 750 video elements in the museum, everything from effects elements to camera originals.” Mitchell produced an installation in one of the museum's galleries called Campaign of 1860, in which guests leave 1850s Springfield and step into a television production studio for an imaginative look at what Lincoln's race for the presidency might have looked like if he and his three opponents had produced TV ads. Tim Russert moderates from a modern TV studio, his commentary framing the imagined political ads of Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell as they are cued and broadcast.

The Campaign exhibit uses digital effects, animation, and layering, with a newscrawl of 1860 events running at the bottom of the screen. It features nine synchronized video screens set in a display wall — three Sony WEGA KV-40XBR800 monitors and six Panasonic WV-CM2080 monitors. Video signals from the nine screens are played in synch from the ETI video server using three Visual Circuits RealTime 4 video cards. The signal distributed as S-Video over Cat5 cable using Extron VersaTools MTP T SV transmitters and MTP R SV receivers. Audio playback is through JBL Control 26C speakers.

As a spectral Civil War battle erupts from his book in Ghosts of the Library, a historian/librarian emphasizes the importance of archiving and studying the past. Stan Winston''s new SW Digital worked on the ghosted effects.

An interactive display called Ask Mr. Lincoln allows guests to choose among dozens of questions to ask the 16th president and then move into a small theater to hear Lincoln's reply — a voiceover with still photographs — intercut with Illinois State Historian Thomas F. Schwartz's comments putting Lincoln's response into context.

The Civil War in Four Minutes is an animated film showing the course of the war over a map of the eastern United States. In the film, one week of the war plays out in one second. The concept and execution are simple enough — the animation was created in Adobe After Effects and Macromedia Director — but the visceral effect of seeing the boundary movements and casualty figures is profound.

The two flagship shows of the museum are Ghosts of the Library and Lincoln's Eyes. Ghosts uses patented, inhouse special effects techniques to present both lifelike and ghosted hologram-like images. The results are unique and quite startling.

Stan Winston Studios, best known for its models and puppets, processed some of the video images in both shows. Producers Andre Bustanoby and Randy Rosa of Stan Winston Studios — now SW Digital — were approached by BRC for what turned out to be SW Digital's first digital special effects job.

BRC''s show systems manager, Carl Hartzler, checks the timing of the nine integrated monitors in the simulated television control room in the Campaign of 1860 installation.

Modern media might not be so distant in concept and execution from the past that BRC is portraying. “The first filmmakers were magicians,” says Rogers. “George Méliès was an illusionist and operator of magical entertainments that combined theater arts, magic, special effects, cabinets of curiosities, magic lantern shows, and now motion picture film. He initially saw film as yet another tool in his kit. For him, architecture, sets, costumes, illusions, and film projections were all one.

“Subsequently, the arts of the theater, the film, and the exhibit hall of curiosities — the museum — all parted company and became separate venues. Today, BRC is bringing these art forms back together and imaginatively combining them with the latest digital electronic wizardry to achieve educational goals. So, really, our idea is so old that it's new again.”

A case in point is the Lincoln's Eyes show, a special effects triptych with projected images and moving set pieces. There is a Civil War sequence using smoking cannons and battle footage. “We used footage from silent films about the Civil War instead of newly created scenes,” remarks Rogers. “These films, made around 1913, had a quality that we could never have created by shooting new footage….Their choice of staging, composition, light, and contrast all feel more authentic than any new footage we could have shot ourselves.”

The editor of Lincoln's Eyes, Ray Greene, concurs: “The silent films would be closer in time to, not only the era of the Civil War, but to the optics of the Civil War. You had cameras that were using prime lenses that were not so very far removed from the lenses that Mathew Brady would have used…where you shoot things predominantly in wide shot.”

A historical controversy arose as to what Civil War footage to use for the show, a controversy just as vital in the studios of Hollywood as in the halls of academia. “I decided that we were just not going to use any footage from the great silent warhorse film: Griffith's Birth of a Nation,” says editor Greene, “because that film, irrespective of its influence, is a horrific racist movie, and there is no place for that film in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum media.”

Birth of a Nation is not an anomaly, unforgivable masterpiece though it is. Made in 1915, it was part of a genre marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil War. Greene found three films with comparable footage produced by Thomas Ince between 1913 and 1915.

Technicians program the multi-layered video effects of Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond burning in Lincoln''s Eyes, the permanent show in the museum''s Union Theater.

Another historical homage to the silent era using 21st century technology was the editing of the Civil War footage over the three screens of the Union Theater. Greene explains, “Because Lincoln's Eyes runs as a triptych on three screens, we made the decision to try to exploit that and to create, where possible, the sense of a visual palette that surrounds you — of a running battle. Essentially, what I tried to do was assemble something that was similar to the climax of Abel Gance's Napoleon. You watch that film: there are times when he uses the wide screen that he invented for that film to show one panoramic view, and then there are times when, in the midst of the combat, he fragments that to kind of shatter the view of the audience.”

Although there has been some controversy over the use of modern media technologies (read “Hollywood”) in a historical museum devoted to such a revered figure, the media generated by BRC for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum shows a respect for history, not only with regard to its subject matter, but in its technical execution as well.

Ray Greene edited the Lincoln's Eyes show in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum's Union Theater. He is an independent filmmaker and has worked as an editor and a director on several media projects for BRC Imagination Arts.

According to Greene, in the realtime illusions BRC created for the museum, elements move just as they would in a theater environment, except the movements are handled editorially rather than mechanically.

His work on projects for the Lincoln Museum has forced Greene to learn less familiar functions of various programs. BRC used three different nonlinear editing programs to create the shows, beginning with an ancient Avid running on an Apple Power PC 8100 that BRC had been using for rough online for years.

As new technology came into play, BRC re-evaluated its editorial systems and invested in the Final Cut Pro platform. Over time, it has become the house platform. The team produced Lincoln's Eyes on a G4 but has recently moved to a G5.

Greene explains, “In the middle of that process of transition, though, we actually did all the time manipulation for the theatrical effects on Ghosts of the Library on the physical ghosts using a Media 100 and Adobe After Effects. So, by the time we got to finishing Lincoln's Eyes, the most complicated show, we had moved fully on to Final Cut Pro. You could actually say that we moved through the recent history of nonlinear editing.”

Greene was able to pull Photoshop files and layers straight into Final Cut Pro, rather than cutting them in from tape. This functionality allowed the team to completely bypass tape for much of the work on Lincoln's Eyes.

“We began the process by having all of our art put to hi-def tape,” says Greene, “then having that tape transferred to Betacam, then having that Betacam imported into the system. Laborious process.”

He adds that sometimes things were modified after the staff thought the elements had been locked, which he calls expensive and wasteful. “By the midpoint of the project…we began by taking things straight from the artists and cutting them directly into the show, and essentially creating an offline version of the show that looked like an online version of the show,” adding “we would then replace [the offline version] once we were sure we had what we wanted with things that had gone to hi-def, come to Beta, and were put into the machine [for an EDL].”

He adds that producing Lincoln's Eyes forced him to delve more deeply into Final Cut Pro than he would have working as a director or editor in television. “The demands that we put on the program in terms of compositing and assembling multiple layers of media and pulling alpha channels — doing all sorts of stuff that you only vaguely do in TV work — were enormous. Both Kish [Mackin, assistant editor] and I were constantly in a state of ‘Wow, how can we get this to do that?’ And then we would sit with the program and, nine times out of 10, we could find a way to get it to do that.”

He finished the Lincoln's Eyes project with a great deal of praise for Final Cut Pro and explains, “I started the process with a chip on my shoulder about Final Cut Pro, and I was fully converted by halfway through the project.”

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