David Kamp reports today in Variety on a 90 minute documentary entitled
"Apollo 11" by film maker Todd Douglas Miller which will have its
debut at the Sundance Film Festival this coming January.
Miller had contacted Dan Rooney, a film and video archivist at the
US National Archives and Records Administration.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by David Kamp, Variety
In May of last year, Miller received a startling e-mail from Rooney. “I was used to the way in which archivists and librarians communicate, which is typically very monotone, very even keel,” Miller said. “But I get this e-mail from Dan, and it’s just insanely long and full of exclamation points and bolded words.” Rooney’s staff had located a cache of largely unprocessed film that he identified as the “65mm Panavision collection.” (In this format, the negative is shot on 65-mm. film and then printed as a 70-mm. positive.) “The collection consists of approximately 165 source reels of materials, covering Apollo 8 through Apollo 13,” Rooney wrote. “Thus far, we have definitively identified 61 of those 165 that relate directly to the Apollo 11 mission, including astronaut mission preparations, launch, recovery, and astronaut engagement and tours after the mission.”
|
When they first viewed the 65mm footage, shot during the lead-up to
launch, their jaws dropped. It has now been transferred to digital.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by David Kamp, Variety
Early one morning this past summer, I joined a small group of people who had gathered at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C., for a private screening of Apollo 11’s first 30 minutes. On the giant screen, the film looked spectacular, in particular the launch: infernal and rumbling up close, as the Saturn V’s five F-1 engines burn 5,700 pounds of kerosene and liquid oxygen per second, and a gorgeous spectacle from a patch of grass few miles away, where a young woman in purple-tinted bubble sunglasses takes photos with her camera, smiling as she snaps.
When the lights came up in the museum’s Imax theater, Miller took questions and comments from the audience. One fellow near the back, at age 87 the oldest at the gathering, happened to be a former director of the Air and Space Museum. He pronounced what he had just witnessed “magnificent.” He did note, however, that the film’s launch sequence, as effective as he found it, doesn’t quite capture the jerky lateral motion that the astronauts felt after liftoff, which he likened to being inside “a wide car being driven by a novice down a narrow road.” One might have been inclined to ask the old-timer how he could be so damned sure of this, were it not for the fact that he was none other than Michael Collins, Major General U.S.A.F. (Ret.) and NASA astronaut from 1963 to 1970.
Armstrong’s two sons, Rick and Mark, were also present at the screening. As boys, aged 12 and 6, respectively, they had watched the launch live with their mother, from a boat in the Banana River, near Cape Canaveral. Of Miller’s film, Rick Armstrong told me afterward, “The combination of the footage quality and the way it was edited made me feel like I was watching it in real time.”
|
Story here :-
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...ar-anniversary