Giacomo Angelini: Creator of some of SA’s most memorable ads
1952-2014
GIACOMO Angelini, known as Giaco, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 62, made some of the most brilliant and compelling commercials ever seen on South African screens.
The famous and much loved Castrol adverts featuring Boet, Swaer and Moegaai that entertained South Africans for the best part of 10 years were his, as was the Castle advert that showed a man sprinting down a street in New York with a crate of beers and up a flight of stairs to join his mates for a party on the balcony.
This was his first Castle advert. It was an immediate and huge success and set a very high standard for the ones that followed, and became familiar to anyone who ever watched sport on television.
Contrary to popular belief, the only part of the first Castle advert shot in New York was the street scene. The rest were all shot in Johannesburg.
Perhaps his most visually stunning commercial was for Fish Eagle Brandy, in which a fish eagle swoops in and plucks a fish from the water. It took him four days to make — three days of which were spent shooting dragon flies, water lilies and reflections in a small pond in the Wilderness area outside George. And, of course, the eagle, which he had found somewhere and called Bono because it had a funny call. After one take, using a prosthetic fish made for the occasion, the eagle disappeared and it was some time before Angelini and his team managed to find it. He insisted on shooting the swoop scene again and again, but nothing rivalled his first take.
The third day was spent recreating the close-ups in a studio.
Angelini was a perfectionist. He did his own camera work whenever possible, and the amount of meticulously detailed planning and preparation that went into every shot he took was as awe-inspiring as it could be trying for those around him.
By far the hardest part of any shoot for him was calling a wrap.
He loved to stretch the boundaries of what was technically possible and keep aficionados of the craft busy trying to
The famous and much loved Castrol adverts featuring Boet, Swaer and Moegaai were his
figure out how an earth he had pulled off this or that effect.
His commercial for Castle Milk Stout, a tired brand he was called on to revitalise, was perhaps the outstanding example of this. As he put it, he found a new way of telling an age-old story by using a combination of freezeframe action shots inspired by timeslice techniques along with innovative grading. He managed to make his dancing bottles advert for Grolsch beer look so salacious that he proudly called it “beer porn”.
His work won him countless top advertising awards in South Africa.
His talent also took him way beyond this country, filming adverts for top brands such as American Airlines, Mercedes-Benz (back home he filmed the BMW “beat the benz” adverts), Lever Brothers Global and Pepsi, among others.
Giacomo Angelini was born in Rome on April 13 1952 and came to South Africa when he was four. His father worked for Olivetti, even though he was a talented artist, and his grandfather was a famous movie director and pioneer in the Italian and French film industry.
His first job was as the clapper loader on a movie set, about the lowest form of life in the industry, for the film e’Lollipop. He was the camera assistant for the Peter Stuyvesant and Paul Revere cigarette adverts, which took him all over the world, before graduating to cameraman.
But it became clear to him that his passion lay in commercials. He liked the detail and the amount of money you could devote to one shot, a luxury that was seldom affordable in filmmaking. The detail work is what really appealed to him. He tried a few documentaries, but they did not suit him. In truth, he was not a reportage photographer or filmmaker.
Angelini was very temperamental, extraordinarily passionate about his work and prone to wild outbursts or sullen, uncommunicative silences when results did not meet the standards he set for himself.
For 30 years, he and his wife, Esther Campbell, worked together — she as his producer. It was an explosive combination. The creative tension between them during shoots was palpable and there was plenty of screaming and cursing, which production members could find terrifying. The casualty rate among them was fairly high.
Angelini spent three years nursing Campbell through stage-four cancer. Then, three years ago, they divorced. He bought her out of the business they had started together, The Vision Corporation, and ran it on his own.
He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in June. He is survived by his third wife, Tessa, whom he married two days before his death. He had, with his first wife, a son who died of cancer at the age of three.— Chris Barron