The Australian Museum wanted to generate some excitement around its mammoth exhibition, but unfortunately imagery of the mammoth itself wasn’t very appealing: the poor thing had been through a lot. To get people talking we would have to find a creative workaround for representing mammoths.
Rather than rely on imagery of the mammoth, we crafted our own out of paper and used it as the centrepiece of a stop-motion animation, re-telling the story of her journey of being frozen for thousands of years and eventually arriving in Sydney.
Generating fresh imagery for the mammoth worked in our favour, because it left seeing the mammoth for real to those who went to the exhibition. Stop motion also gave audiences a new way to engage with something that’s often heavily-represented through CGI. The campaign gave everything away while showing the audience nothing.
It’s amazing what you can do with some scissors, paper, and a long day. The exhibition got far more visitors than anticipated, the website was flooded, online ticket sales exploded. The results were… well… mammoth!
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we create, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.