Amazing Footage! 1970's Shell Petrol Ad (Pre Drone Era)

This early 1970's Aussie Shell Petrol Ad was filmed from a helicopter, but they start from a really distant shot and close in on the car, almost into the driver's seat.
Today, this would be easy with a drone, but in the 1970's, it would have required some pretty hairy (and smooth) piloting of the copter. The last bit may have been achieved with a zoom, but to keep the shot so steady would have been pretty amazing.
Sorry about the crappy projector sound and framing, but it's all I've got- no telecine machine. Sorry

[montymanchester]

Hi Autophyte...


I was the in-house advertising agency producer on this commercial, which was shot in 1972, and I thought it was lost forever! Oddly enough I was talking about the spot only a couple of weeks ago, and was delighted to see that I'd remembered the voice-over perfectly.


The spot was created for Shell through what was then known as USP Benson Advertising in Melbourne, was written by the late, great creative genius called Peter Wyer, who also directed the commercial AND even did the voice-over.


It was shot from a Bell Jetranger helicopter using, for then, a new, vibration-free helicopter mount called the "Continental Camera Mount". This was the first time the mount had been used in Australia, and provided a platform steady enough for the cameraman to zoom in on the car as the chopper tracked with it, then zoom out for the wide shot at the end.


Peter Wyer used this wide-shot/zoom in to close-up/zoom back out to extra-wide shot technique in several commercials for Shell around this time.



I don't recall who the cameraman was on this shoot (it was a long time and many brandies ago), but it may have been either Ian Baker or Rob Copping; both of these great cameramen were doing lots of work for the agency in those days... my money would be on Ian Baker, who has shot most of Fred Schepsi's feature films, as I directed a couple of other commercials with Ian in the 1970s, using this same helicopter camera mount.


Thank you SO much for preserving what I guess must be a 16mm release print of the commercial, and thanks for bothering to project and shoot it in a faux telecine manner.


I might be interested in arranging for it to be professionally scanned, if the cost isn't too great.




Cheers...


Lindsay Hocking

[tanermedia]

Wow that's amazing vintage footage right there - thanks for sharing! 😎👍

[davidpaxton]

I've been searching for this commercial for years. I knew it was Shell but couldn't remember the logo (Go well Go Shell) until an Adelaide historic Facebook page posted an old 1970s photo of a Shell station with the logo on a side wall. I believe there was another similar shot Shell commercial with a 4WD drive zooming along the shoreline of a beach. I would've been around 9 years old at the time as my step father was still alive until late 1972. Thanks for posting. Do you have any other commercials of that Shell series?