To the moon and back
National Geographic Channel commemorates the 50th anniversary of the apollo 11 moon landing with a special documentary film.
ON July 20, 1969, more than half a billion people worldwide watched on television as Neil Armstrong climbed down a small ladder from his lunar module, placed a foot onto the moon’s surface and proclaimed: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
What astronauts Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin did on the Apollo 11 mission changed the course of history, and has gone down as one of humankind’s greatest ever achievements.
Fifty years later, National Geographic is commemorating that historic event with its Mission To The Moon event, which kicks off on July 13 with a two-hour feature documentary titled Apollo: Missions To The Moon.
The film is directed by acclaimed Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Tom Jennings, who helmed unique documentaries such as Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes and Diana: In Her Own Words.
In a recent phone interview, Jennings explained his signature style: “We do documentaries that use only archive footage – there’s no narration nor interviews.
“We recreate that particular era, and make a movie out of broadcasts that were done during the time of a particular event.”
With Apollo: Missions To The Moon,
Jenning uses never-before-heard mission recordings, newly-transferred video footage, and rare photographs of all of Nasa’s 12 crewed space missions to tell the complete story of Nasa’s historic Apollo Space Program.
Instead of focusing on just Apollo 11, the film tells the story of all the moon missions, from the Russian satellite Sputnik all the way back to the first space shuttle mission.
“We took the entire Apollo programme and broke it down to what would be important to tell, where and when,” he explained.
“The buildup to the first launch, the death of the astronauts in Apollo 1, the Apollo 7 first broadcast from space Apollo 11 when they landed, Apollo 13 when they almost died in space we broke that all down,” Jennings added.
Jennings then looked for material not just from national broadcasts, but also various other sources, such as local TV stations, radio archives, and so on.
In total, Jennings and his team acquired and sifted through more than 500 hours of footage, 800 hours of audio and 10,000 photos.
“As we were going through it, we looked for these magic moments that may not be important to the main story we want to cover, but are the mortar between the bricks – special moments that help illustrate what it was like to be alive at that time,” he said.
Jennings also made a conscious decision to avoid using the more famous and wellknown footage and audio as much as possible, in order to tell the story from different angles.
“I told my researchers to get rid of as much Walter Cronkite as you can,” he said with a laugh.
(Cronkite was an American broadcast journalist who covered the Nasa space missions extensively.)
“Don’t get me wrong, I loved him – in many ways, he was the voice of the Apollo missions for the public, and tells a great story. But it’s very, very familiar, and we’ve all heard it before. So we tried to get rid of the very familiar stuff throughout.”
Of course, there were certain things he simply could not leave out.
“You just can’t get away with not showing certain moments. You can’t NOT show the first step (on the moon). You HAVE to show it,” he said.
He did find a way to make it seem fresh though, by inter-cutting the footage of the moon landing with scenes of people watching it on TV all around the world.
“We tried to get the sense that the whole world is holding its breath, and how they were doing it.”
The moon landing itself holds some poignant memories for Jennings, who was seven when it happened.
“My mother was very sick with cancer at the time (of Apollo 11), and she died not long after. So, my world was upside down, and I don’t really remember much about the moon landing,” he said.
“But the previous December, when Apollo 8 went up, I remember that very, very well.
“They had a very famous Christmas Eve broadcast, where they broadcast back to Earth what they were seeing and feeling on Christmas Eve being so far away from home.
“I had walked to the store that night, just around the corner to get some candy. It was freezing cold, and as I was hurrying through the snow to get home. I remember looking up at the moon and thinking, ‘Those guys are up there, and I have to get to my living room to be with my family, so that I can watch them on TV’.
“This whole notion of looking up in the night sky and hurrying through the snow so that I can watch them in my living room as a very young boy, trying to put that together in my head ... it was like a wonder of the universe.
“So to be able to tell the story now, in this way so that I can take people back and live through it, it’s very special to me,” he said.
Apollo: Missions To The Moon premieres on July 13 at 9pm on National Geographic Channel (Astro Ch 553).