Business screen magazine (1946)

film of moon shots . . . continued landing was operating simultaneously in several areas. While Go For TLI was going through the mill, two other A-V teams had related projects with deadlines just as imperative. Editor Don Pickard was preparing a silent film clip on the flight which Frank Borman would personally narrate live in Washington and Europe. Simultaneously Japanese-trained and UCLA-educated editor, Etsuzo "George" Ishikawa, and a veteran Aerojet-General Writer/Director/Producer, now with A-V, Ed Roden, were completing an 18 minute quarterly report (including the Apollo 8 flight) to be viewed by House and Senate committees and by NASA and contractor management. This was quarterly report number 23; A-V had prepared number one and all those since. Elsewhere in the shop, 17 NASA sound films and 1 silent clip, representing 221 minutes of total screen time were in production. These ranged from short biographical profiles on each flight-scheduled astronaut to more elaborate training and orientation films. A-V, which had previously prepared special Apollo 8 animation for NBC News, also regularly helps select and supplies footage to world wide media. During the last two months of 1968, for instance, A-V dug out and printed footage for one hour-long special to be shown in England, another to be shown in France, another for Italy and still another to be shown in Japan. A-V editors also worked on an ABC special and on Walter Cronkite's Twenty-First Century for CBS. "Usually," says Bill Robbins, "all they have to tell our editors is the general subject matter they want, and the editors do the rest. Most of them have been involved in space from the beginning. They know where the footage is." A final A-V service to the Houston space center is one whose results are often seen by the public, responsibility for setting up, handling and maintaining the audiovisual equipment at pre-flight press conferences, shift change press conferences and the important post-flight press conferences when the astronauts first tell the story of their flight. It should be pointed out, in this day of spartan space budgets, that A-V's 167 people and such key departments as the 1 1-man contingent of professional animation artists and animation camera operators are far from being entirely supported by the NASA contract. A-V also scripts, animates, casts, photo J. A. Maurer 16mm sequence camera used to take motion pictures aboard NASA spacecraft. Animation Cameraman Ed Wilson prepares to zoom in for tight shot on lunar module on Oxberry animation camera. graphs, directs, produces, processes and distributes scores of industrial, television, sports, teaching and public relations films each year. A few weeks ago President Rebman announced to A-V staffers that their contract with the Manned Spacecraft Center had been extended three more years, "more than enough time," he said, "to cover the most exciting and rewarding phase of space exploration we have yet seen — man's first actual contact with another body away from earth." Preparation for preserving that historic contact on film is already underway at Bill Robbins' facility, located just across a former Texas cow pasture from the Manned Spacecraft Center "campus" of starkly modern buildings. As most audiovisual people at MSC know, the quality of the Apollo 8 photography from the moon was achieved with far less technical hazards than will exist this spring or summer when the first astronauts step out on the lunar surface. There could be photographic glitches on the moon that no one has ever heard of, even though certain additional precautions are being built into the Maurer sequence camera. For one thing, to keep it from freezing up in the sub zero shadowed side of all objects in space, the lunar surface version comes with an ingenious internal heater. To protect the film from possible harmful solar radiation, all magazines will be kept in the thick-sided command and service module until the last possible moment. Then one of the very, very few things the two astronauts will hand carry as they leave the larger module will be the film. They are scheduled to take "several" magazines with them as they crawl through the hatch into the thinner walled lunar module which will actually ferry them down to the surface. But there are also photographic worries after the return. The exposed film, along with the astronauts and 50 lbs. of lunar rock samples must go into a three week quarantine and decontamination process in MSC's Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Here either the c or the decontamination process itself c adversely affect the quality of the film. The quarantine is not just a matte bureaucratic caution. The laboratory r ager, physicist Persa Raymond Bell, expl the need for strictness this way. "We c really expect to find dangerous organism the lunar samples, but you must remer this port of entry has responsibility for entire planet. We can't be too careful." The probable solution is that some of exposed footage will be decontaminated e by immersion in a solution of ethylene w Other magazines may be permitted to be ^ ilized on the outside only. And still ot may sit out the entire quarantine period a with the cameramen-astronauts. One area of coverage Bill Robbins and Bird are working to improve is photogra recording of the astronauts as they step oi their spacecraft after recovery. Normally, just step out on the deck of the aircraft rier. Following the lunar landing flight, h ever, since they will be in quarantine, i will have to walk through an air-tight pc directly into a special erailer, called a mc quarantine facility (MQF), containing n ical and recovery personnel. The trailer-h( will then be shipped and flown to Hou; where the astronauts will again step thro an air tight portal directly into the e orately insulated Lunar Receiving Labi tory. To get the astronauts stepping of the spacecraft and inside the M' A-V is training recovery personnel to us Canon Scopic camera, one of the few 16 movie cameras that has automatic expos control. Apollo 8 and Go For TLI of course, already history, and, hopefully by mid si mer, the first lunar landing flight will be tory also. Neither A-V, nor the Man Spacecraft Center it serves, can dwell long those things time and duty sweep into the { in order to bring on the imperatives of present. It is the nature of motion picture c erage of space — as it is of the space progi itself — to pay close attention to the fut and to the intriguing question of whether d does, indeed, have a significant destiny a\ from his home planet. A handful of films already underway to match the intense c centration and man hours NASA has to vote to programs and concepts up to I years away — space stations, shuttle crafi orbital stations, and use of astronomy, p sics, chemistry, biology and the entire gar of the resources of earth. For 1969 is more than — as one A-V f is titled — A Year of Fulfillment, it is a y of converting the space accomplishments the past decade into a more meaningful d ade of using the conquest of space for th tangible applications which all men can — as we now see the applications of the o quest of the sea and the air. "So it is" the film concludes, "that Am( can leaders, American science, American dustry have brought the nation to threshold of opportunity. The only quest now is, do we dream as boldly for the 197 as we dreamed for the 1960's?" 22 BUSINESS SCRE