Dan Trachtenberg talks the past and future of Portal: No Escape

Things we knew about Dan Trachtenberg's astounding live-action short film, Portal: No Escape:

• It's fantastic.

• Trachtenberg did a fabulous job directing it.

• It's really fantastic.

And that was about it, until now. Trachtenberg opened up about casting, filming, the special effects and amount of time it took to make No Escape in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, and it seems like a modern-day short-film fairy tale. Things we know about Trachtenberg's Portal: No Escape now:

• Trachtenberg used Twitter to track down his production team, hiring people from New York to the Netherlands to work on the special effects.

• Danielle Rayne, the film's protagonist (we'll call her Chell), plays Sarah Connor in the live-action T2 experience at Universal Studios.

• Trachtenberg fell in love with Joss Whedon. Er, Whedon's motto: "You take people, you put them in peril, you find out what they're made of."

• He plans on making feature films and more Portal films, but not necessarily in that order or entirely separately.