Gettysburg, Readdressed

Written by

Paula Tesch

Seven score and seven years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most poignant, and most memorable speeches of all time. Three score, one fortnight, and two days ago, Adam Gault posted to Vimeo a lovely homage to the speech, created entirely in After Effects.

Personally, I’ve read the Gettysburg Address several times—first in elementary school, and most recently in Nancy Duarte’s Resonate, where I was able to really appreciate if for the first time; both because I wasn’t going to be tested on it, and because Nancy dissected the words so elegantly. For the first time, the words made a real impact. I didn’t just read them, I heard them.

Adam Gault’s video did the words one better—it made me feel them. The video reminded me both of the heroics that took place at Gettysburg, and also the extreme power of the combination of words and visuals. Well-chosen images have the ability to take well-chosen words to a place beyond the senses, to emotions.

Adam offers a modest explanation of the video:

“…The speech doesn’t really need pictures. But once we started brainstorming we were determined to come up with imagery that would complement the words. We wanted to use simple and subtle metaphors that would give the speech context and create evocative compositions without trying to add meaning. Hopefully we’ve done the writing some justice.”

– Adam Gault

To Adam, Stefanie, Chris, Carlo, and Mitch— Nice work. Honestly, Abe would be proud.