Unseen video footage of Amelia Earhart - apparently recorded days before she began her doomed attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 - has been released.

The footage was taken at a small airport in Oakland, California, and had sat on a shelf at the home of John Bresnik - who recorded it - for decades.

His brother, Al, acted as Ms Earhart's personal photographer and took dozens of photographs ahead of the round the world voyage.

The film, Amelia Earhart's Last Photo Shoot, will be released in July by The Paragon Agency, along with an 80-page book which documents a journey that ended tragically short of the finish line when Ms Earhart's plane vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on 2 July, 1937.

Taken with a 16-millimetre camera, the footage remained in Mr Bresnik's office until his death in 1992. His son, also called John, kept it at his home in Escondido, California, for around 20 years.

It features the American aviation pioneer, then 39, as she showed people around her plane and posed for photographs.

Bresnik's son said: "I didn't even know what was on the film until my dad died and I took it home and watched it.

"It just always sat in a plain box on a shelf in his office, and on the outside it said 'Amelia Earhart, Burbank Airport, 1937'.

Richard Gillespie, executive director of the International Group For Historic Aircraft Recovery, said the film is authentic, but that he believed it was recorded in March 1937.

Earhart made her first attempt to become the first woman to circle the Earth in March 1937 when she took off from California.

She got as far as Hawaii, but crashed her twin-engine Electra L-10E on take-off and it had to be shipped home to be repaired.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left what is now Bob Hope Airport in Burbank on 21 May, 1937, heading east.

They were around two-thirds of the way around the Earth when they left New Guinea on 2 July for Howland Island - half-way between Australia and Hawaii.

In one of her final radio transmissions, she said they thought they were near the island, but could not see it and were low on fuel.

Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, for which she was awarded the US Distinguished Flying Cross.

Last year, researchers claimed a fragment of metal found on an uninhabited Pacific atoll came from Earhart's plane.
(Sky News)