Half a century has now passed since mankind first landed on the Moon. NASA Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history when they walked on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Now, a 90-minute BBC Two “feature drama” 8 Days: To the Moon and Back will recreate the NASA Apollo 11 Moon mission and its historic first touch-down.
8 Days: To the Moon and Back screens tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.
The NASA Apollo 11 space program documentary uses a novel technique in an attempt to give a refreshed retelling of the dramatic mission.
The shows visuals make use of recently declassified NASA cockpit audio.
And lip-synching actors are incorporated using recordings from astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins on their journey to and from the Moon.
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The result is has been described as a surreal distinctive approach to one of makind’s most momentous accomplishments.
Andrew Cohen, the Apollo 11 documentary’s executive producer said: “We’d been thinking about making this feature for a couple of years now.
“We knew that this big 50th anniversary was coming up, but the challenge of finding a novel way of telling the story of Apollo 11 is just incredibly difficult – it’s so well trodden.”
The TV show is the result of researchers revisiting dozens of hours of cockpit audio that was declassified in 2009.
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8 Days: to the Moon and Back director Anthony Philipson, described some of the odd exchanges as “space humour”.
He said: “We just realised that these moments of humanity, these little gems were lurking in the archive.
“For instance, there’s this bizarre locker room banter where they compare the craters to ladies’ breasts, calling them ‘slumping big mothers’.”
The BBC team paid particular attention to NASA’s scientific data behind the Moon mission, to the extent they plotted the landing path the Eagle lunar module to achieve the correct CGI visuals.
The BBC opted for the usual visual technique in order to distinguish it from the raft of other retellings of the famous Apollo 11 Moon mission.
Andrew Cohen explained: “We understood this audio could allow you to make the documentary that NASA never made.
“We wanted to feel as if you’re in the capsule, with those three astronauts, listening to their words”.
This lip-synching technique, known as verbatim, is well-established in theatre but has rarely been incorporated in film.
