HOW WE 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.... [--> 2 of 3]