Introduction
Throughout his career Vangelis’ music has been used for dozens of television commercials worldwide. For several commercials Vangelis composed original music, however for his advertisement "Handbuilt By Robots" for the Fiat Strada car, director Hugh Hudson used Rossini’s “Figaro’s Aria” from the opera “The Barber Of Seville” with an added layer of synthesizer effects and electronic compositions by Vangelis.
The 2-minute commercial shows the inside of a car factory filled with machines and robots, that autonomously assemble a series of Fiat’s latest car model, the ‘Strada’, and in different colours too. Considered by many as the best TV commercial ever made due to its intelligent combination of music and camerawork, “Handbuilt By Robots” was unprecedented for British television, due to its length and the fact that for its debut the entire advertising break in the middle of ITV’s popular “News At Ten” program was booked.
Ironically, when the commercial was shot at the Fiat factory in Turin, all workers were on strike and protesting outside against robots taking their jobs...
After this commercial Hugh Hudson would move on to direct his first feature film “Chariots Of Fire” (1981) for which he again worked with Vangelis, whose score would win an Academy award the next year. In later years Vangelis would again provide original music for films directed by Hugh Hudson, i.e. “Night Mail” (1988), a TV commercial for British Rail, and “Rupture: A Matter Of Life Or Death”, a documentary about Hudson’s wife Maryam d'Abo, who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage in 2007.
Details and credits
- Directed by Hugh Hudson.
- Creative Director: John Salmon
- Art Director: David Horry
- Copywriter: Paul Weiland
- Account Director: Franke Lowe
- Client Supervisor: Michael Banks
- Cameraman: John Alcott
- Agency: Collett Dickinson Pearce
- Music by Gioachino Rossini and Vangelis: 'Figaro’s Aria' from “The Barber Of Seville” (1816)
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