Comedy,
2:30 minutes,
English,
ON,
2008
Synopsis
An amateur film crew shooting an "art film" inexplicably use a frozen camera, with predictable results: "There's a woolly mammoth hair in the gate!!"
Creative team
Writer/director/producer: Rick Palidwor
Personal statement
Rick Palidwor says:
"Woolly Mammoth was made for an annual event I produce for the University of Toronto Film Festival, The Super 8 Circus, in which about 20 people shoot an in-camera edit on one roll (about three minutes) of Super 8 film.
These films are projected at the festival with live musical accompaniment.
The film has since shown elsewhere with music soft-synced on CD, double-system style. On this, the video version, I took the liberty of tightening up a few cuts once the music was hard-synced.
The only nerve-racking part of the shoot was reaching the point when I told the cast and crew, "Go away and come back in 4 hours" (the time I estimated it would take for the camera to melt as I continued to film at 1 frame every 5 seconds).
As time went by it looked like the camera would not melt quick enough. I was primarily worried about the film-load: I would run out if it took much longer. So I placed a heater near the ice-cam to speed up the process and sprayed water from a spray-bottle between camera-clicks. This did the trick. You can see the last frame of film roll-out at the tail end of the last filmed credit.
As for artistic intentions, I think it's really funny to encase a film camera in a block of ice and then imagine further that someone would actually try to use it. The title came naturally."