Writing this as I suffer the indignity of having misbehaving organs. I watched a lil 3.5 minute short recreating that part of Jurassic Park 2 where the T-Rex is stomping through San Diego.
Predictably it was about as braindead and predetermined as you would expect. This is going to sound rude but, have any of these amateur Blender Animators seen actual found footage? Y'know, of earthquakes, tornados, mass shootings, urban exploration, etc? I'm tired of horror tropes so please pardon my bitching, I can't animate a CGI dinosaur in a horror short if I tried.
The issue is an over-reliance on framing tricks and tropes. All short form media needs to exist within a certain archetype of its genre, so often you're going to compress horror into a vertical slice. This means our protagonists are virtually always the "opening kill", their fates are predestined and they have no function but as vessel for the audience. I care as much about the camera man who has no name and no flavor of commentary being eaten by a dinosaur as I do Spartan GigaChad when he heroically has a stroke on the shitter during Halo Reach.
If you want to do a found Footage short, get good and CUT IT TO LESS THAN 60 SECONDS. When is the last time you saw footage of someone who was obliterated by a warehouse explosion in downtown Shanghai that was over 30 seconds? Y'all are media literate, I know y'all are, replicate the viral video. Make it snappy, give it a sense of unpredictability and immediacy. Make me realize with the character that they are about to die at the same time they realize it.
While I'm making demands: stop wasting my time with footage of a wall or a hallway while noises happen out of frame. If 3 minutes of your 3.5 minute short is nothing happening and nothing interesting, then it should be 30 seconds. Crikey.