Analog horror is dominating the kaiju scene!
Previously on Kaiju United, we covered the exciting and thrilling 8mm Godzilla short film that premiered in the spring. Since then, KU has dived into the world & filmography of Danny Donahue, who has made numerous short films as a passionate independent filmmaker, even self-teaching himself animation software “Blender” to handle VFX in-house. We got the chance to chat with Danny about filmmaking, his career storyboarding in Hollywood, and sharing our enthusiasm for dinosaurs and kaiju.
Interview
JL: Hello, Kaiju United I’m here with Danny Donahue, an independent filmmaker, storyboard artist, and passionate dinosaur & GodzIlla fan! For those of that don’t know you, Danny, did you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?
DD: Yeah, sure. I’m Danny Donahue. I’m a filmmaker and artist. I’ve been working in the film industry for a little over 10 years now. I’m a professional storyboard artist; I have been doing more writing and directing in recent years, which has always been the long-term career goal.
JL: What film or event in your life made you want to enter the film industry?
DD: I was really into dinosaurs as a kid. That was the thing that got me into art, and later on, filmmaking. Seeing Jurassic Park when I was a kid was a pretty pivotal moment. I was pretty obsessive about all things dinosaurs and wanted to be a paleontologist. And then I think at some point, I realized that maybe the closest thing to actually seeing a real dinosaur might be to make films about them or to tell stories about them. Storytelling as a whole was the other thing that I was interested in, whether it was westerns, or science fiction, or fantasy, horror, whatever it was. I think it was probably in, I guess, in sixth grade I believe, there was a book report assignment, and I’d read some book about dinosaurs beforehand. One of the options for the book report was to make a short film about it. And so that’s what I did. I got the neighborhood kids together, and we made a little short film. And then from that point on, I think I was I was pretty much hooked on the medium.
JL: Aside from Jurassic Park, what are some of your favorite films?
DD: One that immediately comes to mind is The Valley of Gwangi. What a cool hybrid of things that is, and not something I’ve seen often. Cowboys and dinosaurs. I think Willis O’Brien was going to do another dinosaur cowboy thing before that, too, but it never got made.
JL: You mentioned storyboarding being your initial start, but now your focus has been on writing & directing. When did you make the switch over?
DD: To be honest, it hasn’t really been a switch. I mean, I still work professionally as a storyboard artist. That’s how I pay my bills. Writing and directing is not something that is a linear path that people follow. There is not a career ladder into that, particularly. And that could be said for other positions in the film industry as well. But I think it’s especially true of writers and directors because you kind of are one, or you aren’t. There’s not a way to graduate into it. If you want to get into producing potentially, you can climb a ladder from Production Assistant to maybe working on the AD team or something, and you might be able to work your way up to some producing from there. With writing and directing, you have to make something that catches enough attention that you are able to convince people to fund your work. Essentially, you have to sell a script, you got to make short film, you have to do something that creates IP. You are creating a commodity that somebody can bank on, to make a film out of, and that will start your career. And sometimes it’s kind of a hard start, I think. I’ve done some writing and directing for hire, but I’m still at a stage where I’m working to get over that wall, so to speak.
JL: That’s very fascinating to me – all of the inner workings, the nuts and bolts and realities of working in the film industry. All of that stuff just really captivates me. It fascinates me. I just take it in like a sponge. How do you get into storyboarding? You just start like, drawing storyboards, and someone sees it and likes what you do with the composition? What’s the entry point?
DD: When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had a couple film connections — alumni connections from film school, who were people working out here, mostly in commercials. And those were the people I first reached out to, because the whole industry is based on a lot of word-of-mouth stuff. It’s kind of a who you know, and a who knows you sort of thing. And so those were the people that I reached out to initially, and they got me some of my first jobs as a Production Assistant on set. And around that time, I emailed samples of storyboards that I’d done in film school, to this producer I knew, and was like, hey, if you ever need this kind of work done, I do this too. And they were like, sure, we do need some of that done. A T-Mobile commercial was my first job, I believe. Once you get into a space where you’ve done a job or two, if you’re lucky, and you make some contacts with people on those jobs, that can snowball into other jobs, and you slowly start meeting more people and building more connections. For instance, the director on the job you just worked on, he might take you along to the next thing he’s on, or the producer, or the production manager. It’s very much something that that can grow pretty organically. I mean, that’s how my career started anyway. It was very much just like, here’s some samples, and somebody took a risk on that. And then that self-perpetuated.
JL: You’re credited in the art department on the dinosaur flick, 65. Is there anything you can disclose publicly about what you did on that film, or what you may have designed?
DD: I was a storyboard artist on that film — I think I probably storyboarded maybe 80% of that movie. There was more than one artist working on the film, another guy who, who did a lot of stuff, I think earlier on in the process, but I think when it came to shooting boards, I ended up doing a good amount of that work. But really, that process, pretty much every time, is about collaborating with the director. That includes stuff like shot design and working out the blocking, and they usually work with me shot by shot, and go through it all. You’re really just building out the comic book of the movie before you go and shoot it. And there’s always different levels of collaboration on different films in terms of, like, one director may come to you with a whole bunch of stuff already mapped out very specifically, point by point, and that’s what you draw. And other times, it’s a little bit more freeform, and they’re bouncing ideas off of you; they’re asking your thoughts on something. That was pretty much the process on 65, and the other films I’ve worked on too.
JL: That’s awesome. It goes back to your dinosaur origins, full-circle in a way. So, it’s like, hey, I get to draw dinosaurs for a living now!
DD: That was definitely a special asset that I felt like I brought to that one. I got to play with things like, how you reveal a dinosaur, or how to scare the audience. I know that we talked through a number of situations and stuff in that film, such as the coolest way to unveil a creature in this film. It was definitely right up my alley and a lot of fun to be able to work with dinosaurs. There’s few of those films that get made.
JL: Independently, you’re working on Hell Creek around the same time. Can you tell us a little bit about where your vision for the film? It’s an incredible indie film about a man chased by, I think, an Allosaurus, or something very similar, displaced in the time stream.
DD: Yes, it’s a Saurophaganax. It did not live in Hell Creek, which people will point out upon viewing the film, but there’s a bigger story behind it. And the short is basically like a snippet of that; it kind of acts like a prologue to a much longer story, most of which takes place in the Cretaceous.
JL: Did you handle the visual FX for Hell Creek?
DD: I did all of it. It was the first thing I set out to do after learning how to do CGI. I had never done CGI before I did Hell Creek. I started learning blender in 2020 after the pandemic started, because I was at home a lot more. I had always been interested in VFX and had implemented various things into my films over the years, but it was always much more restrained, smaller stuff, such as adding muzzle flashes or something like that.
I’ve also did stop motion stuff when I was a kid because I was big into Ray Harryhausen. But yeah, in 2020, I started doing CGI work, just for fun to see if I could figure out how to do it. And once I kind of got a handle on the basics, it blew the lid off what was possible for me in terms of being able to mount productions on my own, and being able to create spectacle, without any money. The first production with these skills that I really put together was Hell Creek. I’m still really proud of that short; I still look at it, and I’m like, wow, that’s so cool that I was that I was able to pull that off.
There’s some amazing tools that are that are out there, I mean, Blender is free. If you can take time to learn about it, it’s worth it. There’s also a really expansive community out there of people who are making tutorials and providing all sorts of resources. It’s amazing what kind of stuff you can put together.
JL: You’ve done various creatures and entities in your short films, ranging from human-sized ghosts. huge dinosaurs, and now you’ve done Godzilla. What do you think are the biggest differences and challenges in blocking these characters?
DD: Well, I mean, trying to frame for the scale of something that isn’t there is, is challenging. In terms of the Godzilla stuff, at least the latest one, it’s a little different, because that’s all CG. But when it comes to something such as Hell Creek, for example, there’s the consideration of, well, how much of the frame does it take up? Is it consistent from shot to shot? There’s some sort of real technical considerations that go into how you’re blocking a shot and how & where things are going to land and how that affects how you frame it.. So yeah, there’s just some particular challenges that go along with accounting for the scale of the thing.
Also, there is the element of like, blocking things in such a way where you are drawing attention to the scale of it as well. You’re using your framing and your positioning of objects in the frame to kind of highlight that scale and use that to effect. That goes for everything — with your lens choice, your aspect ratio choice, all of that plays into the kind of effect you’re getting.
JL: You’ve maintained a balance between original work and fun fan films. Are there other creatures or IP that you’d like to tackle as a fan film?
DD: I have considered doing some other stuff. The smaller CG projects are a great way to stay creative and learn more about animation and visual effects. I was thinking about maybe doing something with Alien, which is a film I really love. That seemed like something I might play around with. Beyond that, I don’t know, I think I will probably make some other animations, but some of them may be original. Some of them may be more fan film type projects.
JL: Alien is a good choice. You got Romulus on the way, too. Gotta play up that tentpole game a bit when you’re doing the YouTube stuff.
DD: Right. Yeah. Gotta play into the zeitgeist.
JL: What was your first Godzilla movie?
DD: I don’t remember what the first one was, honestly. I know Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the American cut of the original Godzilla, was one of the first because I had it on an old VHS. I watched that version of it a million times. That’s like the one that’s burned into my brain forever. I know Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster and Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah from 1991 comes to mind as well.
The original 1954 Godzilla is probably my favorite, despite its American counterpart being the one I remember most.
JL: On a deeper level, what does Godzilla mean to you?
DD: Actually, I feel like that’s a pretty relevant question to me, because I think particularly recently, Godzilla has meant a lot to me because of how it operates on this metaphorical level. What better metaphor for disaster and destruction and trauma than a giant monster? With this Godzilla eight-millimeter short film, I’m sort of trying to imbue some of my personal experience into that.
That was part of the motivation for making this short. Prior to this, I was making kind of just one-off visual effects shots and just using Godzilla as an interesting subject to experiment with CGI, right? But then this one, I was kind of like, well, I wonder if I could go beyond that.
In 2022, my wife got COVID, and ended up with pretty severe long COVID. And it has completely disabled her. It’s been two years; it’s been a pretty bad harrowing situation. And as a result, I’ve been doing more CG stuff, because it’s a way to be cinematically artistic from my computer while being at home more. It was also thinking about the particular angle on the story where it becomes a thing about a guy with radiation sickness, where it’s this person, with these lingering effects from this encounter with Godzilla, and the idea of this guy not being taken seriously or not believed. His footage was taken by the government. And so, there’s this aspect of the government covering it up, and that felt relevant as well. It’s the top-down messaging about this whole experience, and in particular with long haulers, there hasn’t really been that much noise made about it, despite millions of people ending up like my wife and more every day.
And so, there’s a lot of meaning packed into that. I was thinking about all those things as an artistic catharsis when I was making it. I don’t expect anybody to look at the thing and go, oh, that’s about the pandemic, it’s just buried in there. It’s just really for me, but I thought, you know, well, maybe people will look at it, and maybe it will feel a little familiar, or it will feel resonant in some way or a little bit more real because of how it kind of meshes with some of the themes of the world that we’re living in now.
That’s the long way of saying that I feel like I’m in good company there because Godzilla is something that was born out of that kind of social commentary. It’s a creature that was created out of this desire to artistically explore this trauma that Japan was experiencing in the wake of the atomic bombs and these two cities being evaporated, essentially. What is the fallout of that as a society? Godzilla is this vessel that they can kind of channel some of those themes and ideas into without it just being a graphic documentary about the atomic bombs. It is an artistic way to explore that. So yeah, Godzilla is, I think, really special because it’s a monster that has something to say.
JL: That’s very deep and thought-provoking. Godzilla is a monster, who means something that something can change throughout his entire history, and that keeps him lasting all of these years. It’s amazing. I’m curious – aside from Jurassic Park, I don’t know if there’s a dinosaur story that comes to mind that has such deep and invigorating themes within.
DD: Maybe A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.
JL: I’ve heard of it. I haven’t read it.
DD: That’s the one where it’s about people hunting dinosaurs, and they go into the past and they have this track that they have to walk on, so they don’t disturb anything. And then, somebody steps off the path and crushes a butterfly. And it creates all of these ramifications for when they get back to the future. It’s not nearly as heavy as the very real and visceral commentary that the original Godzilla has.
JL: Is that where the term “Butterfly Effect” came from?
DD: I’m not sure.
JL: In film production, there’s always a really strong camaraderie and great memories & stories, especially on the indie level. There’s just a different kind of culture that exists there. Where do you think that camaraderie comes from?
DD: I think that that camaraderie is born out of the fact that filmmaking is just by nature a collaborative art form. I mean, obviously, I’m making some stuff that is pretty much on my own. But in general, it’s an art form of collaboration, far more so than writing or painting or whatever. And as such, there’s just a real like, in the trenches quality, when you get a production going, and you’re frequently traveling to places or you’re staying somewhere and everybody’s kind of like, holed up, and then the sets become like a little, tiny town.
In a way, you kind of become a self-sufficient little unit, and if it’s a really good set, will feel kind of like family. I think there’s just the shared experience of it too — you’re just going through an experience together, and you’re all kind of collaborating for a common goal. There’s a lot of kinship that can come out of something like that, especially if everybody who is involved is an artist, and is really passionate about the thing that they’re doing. It really contributes to this sense of shared experience. I really love that when it happens.
JL: Do you have any particular memories on set that give this feeling?
I don’t know if I have like, a particular story about that so much. Hell Creek was a crew of two people: so incredibly small. It was me directing and acting, and then it was my director of photography, Paul Houston, who has been a friend of mine for many years. It was just the two of us out there, and it was small enough that we weren’t even recording sound on set. It was shot like a spaghetti western in that way, and I came back with my wife after that. We just recorded a whole bunch of sound, everything we needed, such as footsteps and clothing rustling, and all of that. It gave me the feeling of being out on an adventure with somebody, just out on this hiking trail, kind of out in the middle of nowhere and just kind of running around through the woods trying to make something cool.
I’ve got really vivid memories of the production; it was a really rewarding experience. And it kind of reminded me of being a kid and making those home movies, reconnecting to what made that so fun. You get rid of some of the Hollywood aspects of it and get back to that really intimate, artistic creation and collaboration. And that’s when it’s the most fun for me so. So yeah, as you say, those smaller indie productions, the intimate nature of those can be really, really special, but it can happen on a film of any size.
JL: What’s next for Danny? What do we have to look forward to in your journey as a filmmaker?
DD: Oh, man. Well, it’s something I don’t have really set in stone, I think it’s largely up for debate as to what I’m going to do next. I have several projects that I have in mind. I’m writing a couple of different spec scripts right now. One of them is a Kaiju movie. I’m working on some more animation stuff. I’m hoping to try to get my first feature film going as a, like a micro budget production in the near future. But I’m always taking it one step at a time. I don’t have any release dates or anything like that to plug but yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s things in the pipeline, but as is the nature of freelance life and, and also just working under the sort of circumstances of my personal life at the moment, it’s just a very step by step thing. The best I can say is…. Coming soon!
JL: Thank you for hopping on with Kaiju United.
