Before he speaks, you will be three people who were there, for a minute each, and you will
have to choose. A householder whose parlor is a field hospital. A private at the stone wall
on the third day. A parent at a field grave in November. Then you will stand in the crowd
on Cemetery Hill and hear the two minutes with those choices still in your hands.
About ten minutes.
Read this once, and you can trust every caption after it.
The three people you will be are composites. No one householder, private or parent is
being impersonated. The situations are the documented ones; the words are reconstruction,
and the mark is on screen the whole time:
[V] words somebody actually wrote down — the Address itself,
and the photographs, which are the plates the photographers made that July. [S] what historians agree happened, though no one quoted it. [R] a reconstruction or a staging choice. Not a quotation, and never
dressed as one. [U] not yet verified. Shown, and labelled, rather than quietly
dropped.
What you will come away with. What a battle left behind in a town of 2,400 people;
what the colors were for at the wall; how families searched the field graves; why the crowd
on Cemetery Hill did not know it was hearing anything famous; and, on a relief model of the
field at the end, where each of those four moments happened.
In a headset: you stand in each place; look around and lean in. When a choice comes,
reach for it and squeeze the grip, point at it and pull the trigger, or look at it and hold.
Gold i marks open a card and read it to you. You never move; every cut is a fade. On a computer: drag to look; click a choice, or press 1 or 2. Attendant: the strip at the bottom pauses, steps and resets between visitors. Content: wounds, the dead, and a field grave. Nothing is shown that the plates did
not show in 1863.
The places are photoreal frames generated for this scene (Higgsfield), not
photographs of Gettysburg, until the last act: the plates there are the originals, from the
Library of Congress. The people you stand among are sculptural figures lifted image-to-3D —
composites, not likenesses, the President's figure included. The voices are interpretive casting — the speaking voice of
Lincoln is cast to the high, clear tenor his contemporaries described, not reconstructed from
any recording, because none can exist.