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Yuri’s Night Parties Mark Premiere Of Film ‘First Orbit’

LONDON, England — In the first part of April, a new film will debut at Yuri’s Night parties throughout the world. In a unique collaboration with the European Space Agency, and the Expedition 26/27 crew of the International Space Station, Attic Room Productions has created a new film of what Yuri Gagarin first witnessed fifty years ago. (See three trailers for the film in this article.)

By matching the orbital path of the Space Station, as closely as possible, to that of Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spaceship and filming the same vistas of the Earth through the new giant cupola window, astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and documentary film maker Christopher Riley, have captured a new digital high definition view of the Earth below, half a century after Gagarin first witnessed it.

Yuri Gagarin is about to see what no other person has seen in the history of humanity – the Earth from space. In the next 108 minutes he’ll see more than most people do in a lifetime. What sights awaited the first cosmonaut silently gliding over the world below? What was it like to view the oceans and continents sailing by from such a height?

Weaving these new views together with historic, recordings of Gagarin from the time, (subtitled in English) and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, we have created a spellbinding film to share with people around the world on this historic anniversary.

Yuri’s Night 50 has partnered with YouTube to share First Orbit with the World in a special global streaming event on the 12th April. The Yuri’s Night network will also be showing the film at over 120 parties around the world that day. If you would like to watch it at one of these events then please contact the local organizers directly through the Yuri’s Night clickable party map.

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And if there isn't a party near you then why not make a date with Yuri's Night and organize your own party. You can register the event on the Yuri's Night website by clicking here. And if you are planning a big event then check out our details of how you can download the film in advance, to be part of our global premiere on the 12th April. You can even download a poster to print out and advertise your screening.

A Yuri's night party in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007. - Image credit: Yuri's Night

how they made the film
“When Gagarin came back from space everyone wanted to know what it was like” says documentary film maker Christopher Riley, who conceived the film First Orbit. ”Part of what people meant by that question was what did the Earth look like from up there. And that was something only Gagarin would really ever know.” Whilst the film archive of Gagarin in training, preparing for his flight, and on his world tour afterwards, is extensive, footage of his actual flight hardly exists and when a new windowed cupola was added to the International Space Station in early 2010 it got Chris thinking. “I began to wonder if we could film a new view of what Gagarin would have seen fifty years ago,” he recalls.

The space station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes or so and doesn’t always follow the same route as Gagarin took. So to find out when filming opportunities might occur the European Space Agency (ESA) teamed Chris up with German orbital mechanics guru Gerald Ziegler. Gerald discovered that the Space Station covered similar ground to Gagarin’s spaceship every week or so. 

But to complicate things further the film makers needed to film at exactly the same time of day that Gagarin made his flight; passing over the launch site, near the Aral Sea, at 06:07 UT and on into the night side of Earth over the Pacific Ocean, before emerging into sunlight again over the Southern Atlantic and passing across the whole African continent and the Middle East, and returning to the ground at 07:55 UT, just north of the Caspian Sea. Further calculations confirmed that opportunities to film this trajectory from the ISS at this time of day only came round every six weeks or so.

The second challenge was fitting these filming opportunities into crew time on board the Space Station. The astronauts are obviously very busy, conducting a packed program of experiments, Earth observations and activities like sleep, exercise and meal times meant that accommodating this extra filming request was another problem for the ESA mission directors to solve.

Amongst them Roland Luttgens and Giovanni Gravili who worked closely with the team to turn the filming opportunities Gerald identified into the precise technical notes needed to translate 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 this year, showing the Earth as Gagarin would have seen it almost exactly fifty years before.

The result is a mesmerizing journey beyond the atmosphere – an entire orbit of the Earth – that only around five hundred people have ever experienced for real. What Paolo has recorded is a very gritty, real view of the Earth from space. “You can see scratches and blemishes on the windows”, says Chris, “and we’ve purposefully kept some of the moments when Paolo moves the camera in the film too, just to remind us that this footage has been recorded by human beings up there rather than unmanned robotic satellites.”

Paolo never appears in the film himself, but as the Space Station flies into the night side of the Earth over the north Pacific you can catch a glimpse of him reflected in the window as he floats towards the camera to adjust it.

“Gagarin flew over a lot of ocean during his mission”, Chris reminds us, “and on the days Paolo filmed there were some stunning cloud formations hanging over these deep blue vistas. But one of my favorite views occurs as we cross the Sahara Desert and head up towards the Middle East. There’s the whole of north Africa and the glowing red Sahara and the winding dark Nile river laid out beneath us – just as Gagarin would have seen it as he made his final approach towards the landing site.

Completely coincidently, as Paolo filmed this final leg of the flight, the camera lost its focus on the Earth and started to blur the view – giving the illusion that we are descending back into the atmosphere as Vostok 1 did during re-entry. “It was perfect for the end of the film” Chris reflects.

“On this final flight path back towards his landing site, the scenes we shot for First Orbit are slightly to the east of the original Vostok 1 trajectory” admits Chris “but because we are so high up the vista was pretty similar to that of Gagarin’s vantage point.” Another inconsistency Chris is quick to point out is that Gagarin’s original elliptical trajectory took him both higher and lower than the present orbit of the International Space Station, and so the film makers had to vary the speed of the footage in order to ensure the film hit the right geographical spots at the time Gagarin would have passed them.

“Technically the view we have captured is not at exactly the same altitude above the Earth as Vostok 1 flew”, concludes Chris, “but it’s close enough to give us a real feel for the view of Earth Gagarin would have had through his much smaller porthole in the center of his ‘Vzor’ periscope device”.

One last difference, which the film makers have added, is the Moon. “When Gagarin flew into the night side of the Earth on the 12th April 1961 it was a crescent Moon” says Chris. “According to his autobiography Road to the Stars, he tried to look for the Moon out of curiosity, to see what it looked like from space. But unfortunately it was not in his field of view. ‘Never mind’ he writes, ‘I’ll see it next time.’”

Sadly there was never a next time for Yuri. He was not allowed to fly into space again and died in a plane crash in 1968. “We thought it was a nice gesture to put in the Moon he never got to see”, explains Chris.

The finished film is being given away through the web site www.firstorbit.org and streamed to the world in a global YouTube premiere on the 12th April.

“We hope it will be used as a central part of people’s celebrations around the world this year ” says Chris. The Yuri’s Night network of parties around the world will be showing it, but if there’s not one happening** in your area then why not download or stream the film and invite a few friends over and hold your own celebration. (** See above in this story on details how to participate.)

It’s a unique opportunity to remember Yuri and the great adventure of human space flight which he kicked off 50 years ago.

Tags: ESA, ISS, NASA, Space, spaceflight, Yuri Gagarin, Yuri's Night