Name one person who went from being a competitive mountain biker to being one of the most sought after sport video and commercial director in the world. No one comes to mind? Well, we know someone who fits that description and he is Alberto Accettulli. He tells us that he got into filmmaking by accident because when he was looking for a sponsor he found that the only way to get one was to make videos of himself in action and then send them out to potential sponsors.
He purchased a cheap video camera, set it on a tripod and record his performances on a mountain bike and skateboard. Then he would edit the images at night and send them out to sponsors until he finally got one. After that, he sent some of the videos to Italian TV channels and they started to call him whenever they needed some action sport footage. From there he began getting more filmmaking jobs and at one point he had to make the decision to quit competitive sports and become a director, which is what he truly wanted to do.
More jobs came such as making sport videos for Nike and Red Bull and then he moved to Indonesia for a few years and made even more action sport videos. Alberto is an international citizen simply because he feels at home traveling and he thrives on seeing new and different parts of the world and meeting new friends wherever he goes.
Alberto has done countless action sports videos and an incredible amount of ad campaigns for huge, well-known international corporations such as Nike, Red Bull, Volkswagen, Jeep, Ducati and Renault, Chevrolet, Pirelli, Samsung, Toyota, Visa, Honda, Yamaha, Mitsubishi and many others. He has also done some very excellent work for a non-profit charity known as DKMS. It is based in the UK, the United States, Poland and Chile and it works in the areas of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and blood cancer. He found filming at DKMS as challenging as when he shoots his masterful action films and his beautiful ad campaigns for cars and motorcycles. It was challenging but in an entirely different way than the action sequences that he does so well.
Shooting with real patients and real donors and portraying their lives on screen in order to explain to and to sensitize people about the important subject at hand is very challenging. Then to get them into the bone marrow donor registry and to raise money for the foundation is another tall mountain to climb. However, the DKMS campaign was shot successfully and it was touching, tasteful and extremely well done by the very versatile director Alberto Accettulli.