SNAPSHOT
Hell Creek is a sci-fi horror dinosaur short film that takes place in the Jurassic period. It acts as a prologue to a feature length story that’s centered around the Cretaceous and Hell Creek, Montana. (courtesy YouTube (c) Danny Donahue)
We all know intellectually that time travel can be dangerous – one false move and you can totally screw up a timeline or you trip and break your chrono-warping doodad (that is the technical term I believe) and that’s it, a dystopian future of climate change and zombie aliens is your new home!
But deep down, most people are likely all rose-coloured glasses about it, thinking in breathtaking terms about how cool it would be to zip into the past or race to the future and see the Vikings or wander through a planet-covering city of skyscrapers and ceaseless humanity in the year 3452.
It sure beats your morning commute, right?
Maybe not with talented filmmaker Danny Donahue taking just six brilliantly tense minutes to tell a story of one time traveller’s race to escape the attention of a very hungry dinosaur, which could quite easily go either way.
The delicious thing about this short film, which Donahue told Gizmodo took him twelve months to make and which “acts like a prologue to a much larger story”, is that it could honestly go either way, not once but several times, marking it as one of those immersive stories you cannot look away from.
It’s the result, as the creator says on his YouTube site, the result of a great deal of work.
“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, colouring, 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.” (YouTube description by Donahue; shortened and featured on Gizmodo)
He should be excited! It’s a great watch and makes you hope that if time travel ever happens you pull the lunch with da Vinci and not the running from dinosaurs straw!