Behind the Scenes: Apollo 11

A new documentary film about the Apollo 11 Moon Landing features previously unseen 70mm footage that helps provide a whole new take on the mission and its legacy as it nears its 50th Anniversary.

An IBC365 piece about the restoration work undertaken by Final Frame in New York on the 70mm Todd-AO footage locked for the new 93-minute documentary film Apollo 11.

The obligatory snippet:

That footage amounted to a massive 165 reels of 65mm Panavision footage which had been printed out on the Todd-AO 70mm format. This made it something of a curiosity, not to mention a challenge to Final Frame; only around 20 films were ever shot in Todd-AO (though that list includes several landmark productions, including Cleopatra and The Sound of Music) and NASA only seems to have been shooting it in 1969 largely by accident rather than design. Inevitably, there were no projectors left lying around to see what the footage looked like.

“The obstacles on this project were numerous and each of them unique,” says Sandy Patch, CTO at leading New York post house Final Frame. “First and foremost was just getting access to the film from the National Archives. Given the unprecedented opportunity to work with the 65mm collection, we wanted to make sure that we could make the definitive scans that could be used for decades. We needed a scanner that didn’t exist…”

Read the rest here: Behind the Scenes: Apollo 11