A Sundance Film Festival award-winning film titled “Apollo 11” helped kick off the 50th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 mission Thursday night.
The creators of the film partnered with the National Archives Foundation to put together a viewing of the film, followed immediately by a round-table discussion and Q&A with the film’s director, Todd Douglas Miller, producer, Thomas Peterson, motion picture branch chief of the National Archives, Daniel Rooney, and NASA chief historian, William Berry.
The three-year-project included collaboration with the National Archives and NASA to attain previously unseen original footage and over 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio.
The audio and video were then restored and synced together through thousands of hours of painstaking work and dedication.
“I was never concerned about them telling the truth, unlike many other people from Hollywood who have approached me … who are more focused on making it look good [than the historical accuracy],” said Berry when asked about the effort and detail that Miller and Peterson put into the film. “I never had to worry about that with these guys.”
The documentary is propelled solely by score and the restored original footage, an artistic tool that caused some unique issues.
“We had to sift through nearly two petabytes of data … not to mention there were two government shutdowns that we had to deal with in the middle of the process,” said Miller.
The viewing itself attracted a packed house and a warm reception from the audience, several of whom had already seen a release of the film and were anxious to see it again.
One particular audience member addressed the panel saying, “I saw this in the IMAX in London two weeks ago … and we go to the cinema and spend so much time telling ourselves that these movies aren’t real. But this magnificence forced me to keep reminding myself that this was real.”
During the Q&A, another audience member shared that he believes the legacy of Apollo 11 is that “it permanently made our dreams bigger, even if we lose sight of them at times.”
All of the original mission control footage and 11,000 hours+ of audio can be accessed in real-time through a website launched by an “Apollo 11” co-creator, Ben Feist.
“You can just let the mission unfold in front of you. However, if you choose to dig in, it’s the most deep and wide rabbit hole of information I could muster,” said Feist in an interview with collectSPACE. “I’ve tried to make it rewarding to explore.”
The Apollo 50 Festival will continue Friday-Sunday and will include the re-creation of the launch projected onto the Washington Monument.
