Birth of an Oil Field

This is the second of two industrial films sponsored by Shell Oil, and produced by George Pal Productions. The series is titled "This Is Oil". It's clear they intended to do more, but if so, they went to another producer. Pal was busy making feature films.

It's two shorter industrial films. The first half, narrated by Knox Manning, is about the drilling for oil. It covers techniques in exploratory drilling, and makes a fuss about the great depths oil men will drill. Of course, this was in 1949, and things have advanced significantly. The second half, narrated by Victor Jory, considers what happens after they strike oil. How they get it out of the ground.

This being a George Pal picture, I looked for signs of his inventive stop-motion animation. The best example is in the discussion of how originally oil drilling was modeled on Chinese methods for drilling for salt; there's a lovely and musing little tabletop model that rotates like a carousel to show off the techniques.