New 'Apollo 11' Documentary Makers Discovered Never-Seen-Before Mission Footage

This year's Sundance Film Festival opened with a new 93-minute documentary crafted entirely from archival footage of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, reports collectSpace -- including some never seen before:
In the course of sourcing all of the known imagery, the National Archives (NARA) staff members made a discovery that changed the course of the project -- an unprocessed collection of 65mm footage, never before seen by the public. Unbeknownst to even the NARA archivists, the reels contained wide format scenes of the Saturn V launch, the inside of the Launch Control Center and post-mission activities aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier... The resulting transfer -- from which the documentary was cut -- is the highest resolution, highest quality digital collection of Apollo 11 footage in existence. 'We knew that the clock was ticking, this material had been sitting around for 50 years,' said director Todd Douglas Miller, commenting on the motivation behind the film scanning effort.
The other unexpected find was a massive cache of audio recordings -- more than 11,000 hours -- comprising the individual tracks from 60 members of the Mission Control team. 'Apollo 11' film team members wrote code to restore the audio and make it searchable and then began the multi-year process of listening to and documenting the recordings. The effort yielded new insights into key events of the moon landing mission, as well as surprising moments of humor and camaraderie. 'Much of the footage in 'Apollo 11' is, by virtue of both access and proper preservation, utterly breathtaking,' wrote The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg in his review of the film. 'The sense of scale, especially in the opening minutes, sets the tone as [the] rocket is being transported to the launch pad and resembles nothing so much as a scene from 'Star Wars' only with the weight and grandeur that come from 6.5 million pounds of machinery instead of CG.'

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