Back in 2020, we shared filmmaker Danny Donahue’s Evil Dead-evoking horror short Beast of Prey. He’s got a new one with a killer logline: “a time traveler is hunted by a dinosaur,” and it’s surely worth stopping what you’re doing to spend the next few minutes immersed in Hell Creek. Check it out!
“I made it because dinosaurs were what inspired me to get into filmmaking in the first place. It’s only six minutes long, and acts like a prologue to a much larger story, but it took me an entire year to make. I’ve been creating short horror films for years, but I decided it was time to try something a little different,” writer-director-VFX creator Donahue told io9 in an email. In Hell Creek’s YouTube video description box, he also breaks down the short’s more technical aspects (impressively, he’s self-taught!), and notes that “I studied all sorts of animal videos, watched Jurassic Park, Walking with Dinosaurs, and other pieces of dinosaur media to try to get a good understanding of realistic movement. Simultaneously I was planning out the short film ... we filmed the short in two days with a two-person crew. After filming, I spent many months on my computer, animating, compositing, mixing, coloring, and doing everything else that had to be done to finish the film. It’s been a long time coming and I’m really excited to show everyone.”
The end result is short, but hints at a world that could definitely be expanded: who is this time traveler, where did he come from, where’s he going, how does his technology work, what’s he gonna do now that he has a giant stowaway hitching a ride behind him? And here’s a fun fact: Donahue also told io9 that “after the fact, I learned that one of our locations was actually used in the first Jurassic Park film (the raptor dig site scene) which felt like a good omen, given the subject matter.”
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