A time traveler is hunted by a dinosaur...
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, MT. If you enjoy it, please help us share it around!
In Sep/Oct 2020 I installed Blender for the first time, knowing nothing about CGI. I started learning with Blender Guru's donut tutorials and worked up from there, teaching myself as much as I could as quickly as I could. I had previously been scared to even try CGI, as it seemed like a skillset that was completely beyond my abilities, but after about a month of hard work and hours of tutorials, I had a usable 3D character. A few months after that, I was able to make the dinosaur that I used in this short film. It took me several weeks to model and just as long to rig and weight paint. Then I started learning how to animate it. 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. I storyboarded everything in meticulous detail, and by spring 2021, my fiancée, Casey, and I had scouted locations, and my friend Paul Houston and I were ready to shoot. We filmed the short in 2 days with a 2 person crew. Later, I licensed music from a talented musician called Paleowolf: youtube.com/c/Paleowolf . 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. I think it's probably the thing I'm the most proud of making. Dinosaurs started my obsession with movies when I was a little kid, and this project feels like coming full circle 30-some years later.
Writer | Director | VFX - Danny Donahue
Cinematography - Paul Houston
Music - Paleowolf
Special Thanks to Casey Fichtner, Michael Matzur, Ryan Godoy, and Thomas Asher