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"The Sets of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter\nHistory meets fantasy in the new movie, based on a popular novel that reimagines Honest Abe as a heroic demon slayer\n\"From the get-go, it was critically important that the film remain loyal to the character of Abraham Lincoln, as the story was so tightly interwoven with historical facts,\" says production designer Fran\u00E7ois Audouy. Before Lincoln became a lawyer, he worked and lived upstairs from a general store in Springfield, Illinois. A sketch of the shop interior is pictured here.\n\"We did tons of research,\" set decorator Cheryl Carasik says of the shop interior they created. \"Every bottle and label was period-correct. The bottles were real, and we would tint the dyes to mimic molasses, syrup, et cetera, for an authentic feel.\"\nAbe's mother, Nancy Lincoln, died from a food-borne illness when he was nine years old. In the film's version of events, the young Lincoln later learns that his mother had actually been killed by a local businessman and vampire named J. Barts. Seeking revenge, Lincoln tracks down Barts at his shipping company warehouse, which the designers built on New Orleans's Lake Pontchartrain waterway, shown here.\nThe designers created color stories for each of the film's settings, which included Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C. The early scenes in Springfield were \"light and airy, lots of pale pastel colors, and happy,\" says Carasik. In the pastoral picnic scene rendered here\u2014ultimately filmed at a park in New Orleans\u2014Lincoln confesses his secret life to Mary Todd, his future wife.\nThe decaying antebellum plantation depicted in this sketch is the home of Adam (played by Rufus Sewell), the oldest and evilest of the vampires who plot to take over the U.S. \"For the design of the mansion, I drew inspiration from the Belle Grove Plantation [in Louisiana], a grand and elaborate Italianate mansion and one of the largest ever built in the South,\" Audouy says. (It was destroyed by a fire in the 1950s.) \"I was intrigued by the idea of bringing this home back from the dead and became obsessed with the details of its architecture, tracking down pages of architectural details and even acquiring original molds for the plaster capitals. We started with Belle Grove as a foundation, then increased the scale by 20 percent to heighten the feeling of grandeur.\"\nTo furnish the mansion, period pieces were acquired from local vendors in New Orleans. \"It's a great place to shop for mid-18th-century furniture\u2014there is a crossover between French and Colonial antiques,\" says Carasik, who found many of the items at the consignment shop Renaissance Interiors. The Zuber hand-painted scenic wallpaper on the staircase walls is a faithful reproduction of an antique original.\nAs a way of opening up the interiors for the fight scenes, the designers placed furniture\u2014including the antique music chairs (found in the Warner Brothers prop department) visible here\u2014around the perimeter of the room. The designers also faithfully re-created hundreds of weapons from the period for the action sequences and Civil War battle scenes. \"Traditional firearms experts and craftsmen traveled to New Orleans to hand-fabricate most of the weapons for us,\" Audouy says. \"Not only Lincoln's fully functional firing ax-gun, but also countless swords, knives, rifles, and artillery.\"\nTo achieve a look of decayed decadence in Adam's mansion, the design team used acid and a blowtorch on the curtains and valences, and they distressed the furniture with sandpaper and band saws. \"We were trying to show this was one of the oldest established vampire houses of the period\u2014it had been around for hundreds of years,\" explains Audouy of the plantation's French-colonial designs. In this scene, vampire Vadoma (Erin Wasson) traps Lincoln beneath an antique chair.\nComputer-generated imagery (CGI) proves useful for replicating well-known locations such as the White House, seen here. In one of the film's scenes, a vampire sneaks onto the president's lawn and kills his 11-year-old son, Willie Lincoln\u2014who did, in fact, die at the White House, from typhoid fever.\n\"The story called for several sequences to feature the U.S. Capitol, and these all required careful collaboration with visual effects for CGI extension of our built scenery,\" Audouy says. After constructing sets that were based on actual architectural plans for the Capitol, they used high-resolution scans of the earliest photographs of the building to create the CGI imagery. \"The scenes of Lincoln's 1861 inauguration [pictured here] and subsequent speech to Congress in the House Chamber couldn't have been more accurate,\" Audouy insists. \"We re-created the Victorian desks, paintings, and carpet that were in the House Chamber at the time. We also calculated the exact number of congressmen who would have been in session during the Civil War.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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