“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.”
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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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