Framestore’s VFX supervisor Ben Morris was on set in Richmond and Petersburg, Va., to oversee VFX work removing the traces of the 21st century – telegraph wires, power lines and modern buildings – to make Virginia look like it did in Lincoln’s day, or in many cases, like Washington D.C.
The film’s opening black-and-white dream sequence stands out visually, showing Lincoln standing aboard the U.S.S. Monitor as it rushes towards a shore that gets no closer, viewed as though through a vintage lens vignette. This sequence was shot with Daniel Day Lewis standing on a small section of foreground boat deck in front of greenscreen. Framestore later integrated the entirely digital background with carefully considered photographic treatments to complete the dreamlike look.
Richmond is home to the Virginia State Capitol, a building that possesses the familiar front steps and pillars of its larger Washington equivalent, but not the dome or scale. Framestore used it as a basis to start building the Capitol Building. Special attention had to be paid to historical detail as the building was only just complete at the time of Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1865, a key moment in the film.
That particular speech is famed as one of the first ceremonies of its kind to be captured in a collodion plate photograph. Framestore helped recreate the scene depicted in this famous historic photograph exactly, with the crowd around the smaller, Richmond-based Capital Building replicated from multiple crowd passes and matte paintings used to add scope at the shot’s margins.