First Orbit (2011)

Wissenswertes

First Orbit is a 2011 feature-length, experimental documentary film about Vostok 1, the first human space flight around the Earth. By matching the orbit of the International Space Station to that of Vostok 1 as closely as possible, in terms of ground track and time of day, documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli were able to film the view that Yuri Gagarin saw on his pioneering 1961 orbital space flight. This new footage was cut together with the original Vostok 1 mission audio recordings sourced from the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation. The film features the music of composer Philip Sheppard.

Production

Although the film archive of Gagarin’s training, preparations, and subsequent world tour is extensive, footage of the actual Vostok 1 flight hardly exists. In 2010 Riley came up with the idea to film Yuri’s original view of the Earth from space through the International Space Station's new giant-windowed cupola.

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, but it does not always follow the same route that Gagarin took. To find out when filming opportunities might occur, the European Space Agency (ESA) teamed Riley up with German Flight Dynamics Engineer, Gerald Ziegler. Ziegler discovered that the ISS covered similar ground to Gagarin's Vostok 1 spaceship approximately every week.

Further calculations confirmed that opportunities to film this trajectory, with the correct sun angles, at this exact time of day, only came around once every six weeks. According to Riley, the second challenge was fitting these filming opportunities into crew time on board the space station. "The astronauts have a busy schedule; conducting a packed programme of experiments, Earth observations and activities like sleep, exercise and meal times.

Mission directors Roland Luettgens and Giovanni Gravili worked closely with the team to turn the filming opportunities into precise technical notes which translated Chris's camera directions into instructions for the crew. After a brief test shoot in November 2010, conducted by NASA's Expedition 25 astronaut Doug Wheelock, European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli filmed most of the footage for the project in early January 2011.

The music in First Orbit was composed by Philip Sheppard and was taken from his album Cloud Songs. Riley first worked with Sheppard in 2006 on the Sundance award-winning feature documentary film, In the Shadow of the Moon. Since that time, he had worked on a new suite of music inspired by space flight, which he donated to this new film project.

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