Footagevault is a stock photography company, founded in 2006. The company sells royalty-free and rights-managed video footage and audio clips. It currently specialises in the space flight and space exploration. Archive film sourced by Footagevault formed the basis of the 2007 documentary feature filmIn the Shadow of the Moon and the spin off Discovery Channel series Moon Machines. Through their work on these projects and as a consultant to the series NASA's Greatest Missions the company has played a key role in the Discovery Channel’s legacy project, working to help preserve NASA's film archive. The company is located in London, England.
History
Footagevault was founded by Christopher Riley and grew from an interest he gained in archive film whilst working on the BBC landmark series The Planets; in the late 1990s when he first spent time working with NASA's film archive at both the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California. Returning to this film archive after leaving the BBC, he started to supply it to other documentary film productions through his first company The Attic Room. Footagevault was formed in 2006, when streaming video was still in its infancy. The searchable web site was launched the following year to coincide with the release of the documentary feature film In the Shadow of the Moon for which the company had sourced and supplied all the NASA archive. The Apollo flight film collection had been stored under liquid nitrogen at the Johnson Space Center, since its return from the Moon in the early 1970s and only brought out a handful of times, most recently in early 2005 when NASA transferred the films onto High Definition tape. Through Footagevault, In the Shadow of the Moon was the first film production to make use of these new 2005 digital HD transfers. Since then the company has pioneered the publishing of the collection online in a fully searchable form, making it accessible for the first time in this way to historians, scholars, film makers and journalists.
In an attempt to further share the Apollo film archive Footagevault has also partnered with NASA's Apollo Flight Journal setting the footage in its proper historical context within each mission. In 2009 Footagevault collaborated with the London Science Museum on a project to project this complete Apollo film archive in public for the first time. 'Apollo raw and uncut' ran through July and August 2009 in the museum's Energy Briefing Room.
Collection
Footagevault's collection currently specialises in space flight, spanning the 20th century, from Sputnik 1 and Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 flights to the International Space Station missions, and from the first robotic lunar missions to the most recent NASA missions to Mars and Saturn. They hold footage of most of NASA’s planetary missions from the 1960s to today and early Air Force experiments in human space flight; from Joe Kittinger’s famous high altitude parachute jumps to the first manned capsule flights into space. As part of this collection they curate an extensive collection of Earth views filmed from orbit and historic views of how computer technology supporting the missions has changed on the ground during the last 50 years.
