Our Short Film is Out: The Untold Story of Apollo 18

Published on July 12, 2023

Short Film, stuck-series, unreal engine 5, Virtual Production

Astronaut Johnson is on a secret mission to the moon. But things aren’t going as he hoped for. This is the untold story of Apollo 18 in 1973, a fictional comedy short film by Jordy Vandeput.

Short Film Series ‘STUCK’

The Untold Story of Apollo 18 is the third episode of the series STUCK. Every episode is a dedicated short film, but they have the same theme in common: there can only be 1 actor and 1 location. You can watch all the episodes here.

A comedy Short Film

Comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off in film. Jokes need to be timed correctly, the viewer needs to understand them and they have to be funny of course. If we succeeded at that is up to you 🙂

It’s not the first comedy short film that we made though. We tried making a deep fake parody on the Home Alone film once, which was a great experience but turned out to be unfunny due to pacing and too many inside jokes.

We learned from that and tackled a new comedy short the next year: Game Over. The story was much better. It has character development, a story arch and relatable jokes.

Virtual Production

For ‘The Untold Story of Apollo 18’, we decided to shoot everything in virtual production. This means that the environment is entirely digital, which we used Unreal Engine 5 for. Using the VIVE CamTrack we could bring the same movement of the real camera to Unreal Engine 5 and match the shots.

Behind the Scenes

We released the behind the scenes video last month, definitely worth checking out to see how it all came together! We are very thankful to everyone and all the partners that made this film project possible.

This film was funded and supported by Rotolight, MSI, Lickd and Hollyland. All these partners provides us the gear to help us make this film possible, but also funded the project. We owe a huge thank you to all of them!