User:Civil War Attraction

Civil War Movie - Seeing The Elephant
Seeing The Elephant, the centerpiece of the Fiery Trial Civil War Exhibit at the Civil War Museum in Kenosha, WI, is a high-tech, 360 degree, digital movie, that takes the audience through what is best described as an experience. The technology required to achieve this unique event is offered only by a handful of venues throughout the nation. Seeing the Elephant is a powerful, multi-sensory film with a ‘moving cyclorama’ referring in part to huge in-the-round paintings that caused a popular sensation more than one hundred years ago.

The film offers an authentic, and historically accurate, glimpse of a soldier’s first encounter with combat; what the soldiers referred to as Seeing The Elephant. (a phrase used in the Civil War to describe the experience of combat)

Experience the Civil War in the 21st Century The movie, narrated by nationally recognized, award-winning broadcast journalist Bill Kurtis, is the long-anticipated centerpiece of the Museum’s permanent Fiery Trial gallery. Seeing the Elephant uses historical letters, journals, and diaries to tell the stories of soldiers as they leave home, endure training camps, face battle, and ultimately deal with the consequences of war.

Lance Herdegen, the Museum’s historical consultant and one of the script writers said, “The Seeing the Elephant Gallery is a key element in the Museum’s mission. It helps visitors realize the soldiers of the Civil War were somebody’s son, husband, father, brother, cousin. It puts a human face on the story of the Upper Middle West from 1861 to 1865.”

More than two hundred actors, reenactors, film crew, technical and historical advisers, and Museum staff gathered at Old World Wisconsin (near Eagle, Wisconsin) in June 2013 to create Seeing the Elephant.

During the five days of filming, Civil War reenactors immersed themselves in the Civil War. Doug Dammann, Civil War Museum curator, said the reenactors “put forth a great deal of effort from sunrise to long after sunset. BPI [the production company] asked a lot of them.” Some reenactors had three or four wardrobe changes in one day, Dammann explained, because they portrayed soldiers of the Union and of the Confederacy and civilians.

The movie runs every hour on the hour beginning at 11 am. The movie’s Trailer and photographs of the filming of the movie can be viewed at http://thecivilwarmuseum.org

The Museum The Civil War Museum is like no other Civil War museum in the country. The museum focuses on the Civil War from the perspective of the people of the six states of the upper middle west: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. These six states sent 750,000 men to serve in the Union army while providing much of the foodstuffs and raw materials necessary for the northern states to carry on the war. Through the use of personal stories and narratives, the Civil War Museum also explores how the Civil War impacted the people on the Western home front before, during and after the war by connecting the prewar causes to the postwar effects.

In conjunction with the Civil War Museums, State-of-the-art museum technology, interactive, engaging, exhibits, and life-size dioramas, visitors may feel as though they've stepped back in time, while learning of the influences that brought this nation to War. Imagine seeing the battlefront, through the eyes of those who lived it. Taken from diaries and letters, of the soldiers, spouses, children, slaves, nurses, clergymen, and tradesmen, whose lives were deeply impacted, these touching and personal stories describe their struggles in a way only they themselves can.

The museum shares a beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline campus with the Kenosha Public Museum, offering visitors free parking and a quick trolley ride to their sister museum, The Dinosaur Discovery Museum. The Kenosha Public Museum is a natural sciences and fine and decorative arts museum that affords site seeing on the bank of the Great Lake Michigan, and the museum has many fall and winter events for families and students looking for a great day trip.

Movie Trailer - Seeing The Elephant

The Civil War Museum - Kenosha, WI

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