KC filmmakers help bring Revolutionary War to life in unique Army museum exhibit
.jpg "Wide Awake Films of Kansas City has helped create a unique exhibit, “Call To Arms: The Soldier and the Revolutionary War,” for the U.S. Army. The two-year exhibit opened earlier this month.")
We know the marquee names of the American Revolutionary War. George Washington. Alexander Hamilton, whose name has been lit in lights on Broadway for 10 years. But in the fight for this country’s independence, Sylvanus Wood played a part too.
He was a 20-something shoemaker from Massachusetts who fought the British at Lexington and Concord — the first battles of the war — and is credited with capturing the first British prisoner of war with his trusty musket.
And there was Anna Lane, one of thousands of wives who followed their husbands into battle. Anna even dressed as a soldier to fight and later received a government pension for her service.
Never heard of them? Don’t know the stories of the ordinary people who accomplished this most extraordinary success celebrated with fireworks every Fourth of July?
A new two-year exhibit at the National Museum of the United States Army in Fairfax County, Virginia, shines a spotlight on those everyday soldiers.
Wide Awake Films, headquartered in downtown Kansas City, helped bring the exhibit to life.
“Call to Arms: The Soldier and the Revolutionary War” is said to be one of the most extensive exhibits ever assembled about the Revolutionary War. Several priceless artifacts from the war that have never been displayed are on loan.
The war is getting extra attention ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026.
Working with the museum’s curators and exhibit designers, filmmaker Shane Seley’s Wide Awake team produced seven original media and interactive experiences, including unique 3D animations of the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Yorktown.
Propaganda3, a digital marketing company in downtown Overland Park, also contributed.
“The Army had decided they were going to do a two-year temporary exhibit on the common soldier in the American Revolution, which is my whole thing, too,” said Seley, 57, the company’s Kansas-born founder and a history buff since grade school.
“I know the generals and the bigger story, and that’s great and all. But I’m really into why did people volunteer and why did they walk away from their lives and … pick up a musket? Why did they do this?
“Telling that story from all those vantage points is really fascinating to me. This project just hit all those touch points.”
The exhibit, four years in the making, is located inside the history museum at Fort Belvoir, an Army installation in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Seley’s team has been involved for two years.
“We wanted to kind of jump off the mission of this museum, which is really to tell the Army’s story through the eyes of soldiers,” said Paul Morando, chief curator of the museum which opened in 2020.
“We wanted to zoom in on what they felt while they were camping, while they were fighting, while they were marching. We wanted to focus on the common solders, individuals who are not in the history books.”
They were weekend warriors, Pulitzer-prize winning historian Rick Atkinson said in a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview this month about the new exhibit. He recently published the second part of his trilogy on the war.
“They’re soldiers who turn out once every few weeks to practice the manual of arms, to learn how to load a musket,” Atkinson said.
The British, on the other hand, “are professional soldiers with professional officers, men enlist in the army for life, usually. So these are troops that know their business,” said Atkinson.
Yet after the famous “shot heard ‘round the world” — the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 — “left bodies all the way from Concord to Boston ... the Americans show that even though they’re not the professional force that the British are, they know how to fight, they know how to use weapons and they know how to kill,” said Atkinson.
But the men have lives and jobs back home. “They’re farmers, they’re tradesmen, they’ve got families to take care of. You need to make this army into a force that can take on the British full-time,” Atkinson said.
Two months later, on June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress founded the Continental Army, replacing the militia with an official fighting force with Washington as its leader.
The fate of “unborn millions,” Washington said, depended on their courage and conduct.
“It will be the central institution that is going to determine whether or not the United States of America really does become a country,” said Atkinson.
Getting the story right
On its Instagram, Wide Awake Films describes its mission as “creating films, interactives and virtual reality productions that breathe new life into the stories of our past.”
The company is known for having one of the most extensive archives of war reenactment film footage in the country, which has made it a go-to-source for history museums and documentary creators nationwide.
Last summer Wide Awake worked on “The Civil War’s Lost Massacre,” a documentary about Black Union soldiers killed in the last months of that war by Kentucky Southerners and buried in a mass grave.
Right now, “we’re engaging with the Teddy Roosevelt presidential museum and I’m reading my third book on him,” Seley said. “I really dive in. We all do.”
The company also provided seven minutes of reenactment footage for historian Ken Burns’ upcoming 12-hour documentary about the Revolutionary War.
“Right from the beginning, I knew they were the right company to work with because of their attention to detail in getting our story right,” said Morando.
“They do have a massive library, they have tons of reenactments. But it’s not just the content of what they have ... their level of knowledge of history is incredible,” said Joey Betzen, chief operating officer of Propaganda3, which created touch-screen displays for the exhibit.
“Just to sit down and talk to (Seley) and hear him geek out. I have yet to come across ... anyone else who has that depth of knowledge.”
The company started out doing commercial work, “working for all the big Kansas City brands and a lot of national brands. But history is why I really started it,” said Seley, who graduated from the University of Kansas.
“A lot of people don’t have the luxury like I did in the ‘70s of being able to hang out in the library all weekend. I got really engaged in history that way and I kinda wanted to come up with a way to do that for future generations. And I figured cinema was a good way to do it. And that’s how we started Wide Awake Films.
“And since then we have just been really fortunate to build up a nationwide alliance and partnerships with some of the greatest minds and some of the greatest historians out there. We decided about three years ago O.K., we’re going to go 100% history.
“And with that pivot, it’s just been phenomenal.”
He plugged into the world of reenacting as a reenactor himself, invaluable connections that have helped him grow the business.
“A lot of guys in the ‘90s that I hung out with are now in their 40s and 50s and we’re all running magazines and museums and kind of still doing history,” he said. “That passion stayed with a lot of us. And we all kind of connect on a lot of this stuff. It’s kind of a little club.”
An emotional experience
After a private VIP opening that Seley attended, the exhibit opened to the public on June 7. Visitors have described it as an emotional space. You have to open a door to get in, leaving the bright lights of the lobby behind and entering a purposefully low-lit intimate space.
Visitors first will see Wide Awake’s work, the story of Bunker Hill, one of the earliest battles of the war, fought in 1775.
His team created a presentation using 3D technology and live-action scenes filmed with local war reenactors and stunt experts at rapper Tech N9ne’s studio in Lee’s Summit.
“The Army had seen something in a World War I museum in France where they were projecting the battle map onto a surface that’s topographically the same as the actual battlefield itself,” Seley said. “We’re kind of calling these battlescapes.”
Artists sculpted the Bunker Hill and Yorktown battlefields from fiberboard and foam.
“Then we projected animations onto that topographical surface so when you’re in the museum you can see the hills and the ocean and the shorelines and little ravines,” he said. “It’s probably one of the first times it’s been done in the United States and we are loving it. We’d like to do more of it.”
But the exhibit doesn’t only focus on battlefield tactics, Morando said. The soldiers’ stories are personal.
Today I marched. Today I was hungry. Today I passed through a town I’d never seen before.
Seley’s team created a large-scale projection to “drop” visitors into daily camp life.
“The Army really wanted to show that militia men were molded into an army that could put down the greatest (army) on earth at the time,” Seley said.
He didn’t realize all it took for Washington to “turn what could have been a rabble into a real army.”
For one thing, Washington “had a problem that the British would take over cities and camp their men, they call it billeting, in houses. They would just take over and have 5,000 men camping in houses. Washington’s army found themselves in the woods,” Seley said.
“But tents don’t cut it in Valley Forge, so he copied the Roman army who would go out and build log huts using just a few hand tools. And very quickly those log hut cities became the big thing with winter armies.
“So every time Washington’s army would go in and camp, 12 men would go in and build a hut and there were rewards for building the fastest, best hut and they would go in like a bunch of beavers and fell forests and make cities out of nothing.”
Women were in the camps, too.
“There were 20,000 women of the army that were following and living with their men because a lot of times the women would have no financial support when the men went off to war,” Seley said.
“So Washington let the women show up and they performed various duties around camp and sometimes you saw families with the soldiers.”
Wide Awake created another interactive that gives visitors a close-up look at powder horns used to carry gunpowder.
“I’ve seen powder horns, but I didn’t understand that they’re these amazing sources of folk art from that time,” said Seley. “The powder horns are made of horns off of animals but they’re a really pliable material and it was common for the men to carve things into them that would either talk about them personally or give information about where they fought or what they did. So every one is super unique.”
Wide Awake created a touch-screen where people can select a specific powder horn in the display and see an up-close image of its engravings and carvings.
‘Our first veterans’
Morando made sure that every artifact displayed had a known story with it and could be tied to a specific soldier, staying focused on “our first veterans” who left their families and towns to fight for independence.
Not only have some of the artifacts never been displayed — some came from private collections — but they’ve never been shown together.
George Washington’s battle sword, the 1st Rhode Island Regiment flag, a loyalist’s flag from the Canadian War Museum, “these are things you see in catalogs of their own museums,” Morando said.
“But bringing these core pieces together ... it is unprecedented. It has never been done before.”
Negotiations over items that came from overseas proved challenging enough. But getting that flag from Rhode Island, flown by the only regiment in the Continental Army to have segregated companies of Black soldiers, was an especially high hurdle.
It had not left the state of Rhode Island since 1784. This is the first time it’s been displayed in a museum, Morando said.
“We had to work with the state representatives to change the law in the state to allow this flag to leave the state,” he said.
.jpg "Bunker Hill 2 (2).jpg")
Seley said his company is looking for more stories like these to tell.
“I just think it’s important for these exhibits that are based in facts, that are sourced, that have almost a journalistic backbone to them, to be present in American institutions and know that what you’re seeing is true,” he said. “These are facts and we can show you why. I think that’s really important right now..”
His team is currently working with a North Carolina museum to document the Wilmington Massacre of 1898.
“They’re called riots but it was basically a massacre of Black politicians one night in the city,” he said. “We love telling these new, maybe unheard of, stories from history so people can understand this country for real.”
This story was originally published July 3, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
.jpg)