Although the film archive of Gagarin’s training, preparations, and subsequent world tour is extensive, footage of the actual Vostok 1 flight hardly exists.

To find out when filming opportunities might occur, the European Space Agency (ESA) teamed Riley up with German Flight Dynamics Engineer, Gerald Ziegler.

This meant that accommodating the extra filming request for First Orbit was yet another challenge for the ESA mission directors," he told BBC news in a March 2011 interview.

[1] On the final flight path back towards Gagarin's landing site, the scenes shot for First Orbit are slightly to the east of the original Vostok 1 trajectory.

Mission directors Roland Luettgens and Giovanni Gravili worked closely with the team to turn the filming opportunities into precise technical notes which translated Chris's camera directions into instructions for the crew.

[1] Additional archive audio in the film comes from a Radio Moscow report broadcast during the flight and news bulletins from the BBC and the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia TASS.

To make these translations as accessible as possible the producers launched a crowd funding campaign on IndieGoGo to manufacture multi-language DVD and Blu-ray discs of the film.

[7][8] They raised only 20% of their target amount, but went ahead with the production anyway, releasing a limited run of discs on 12 March 2012, through the project's web site, and Amazon, almost exactly a year after the film was originally launched.