Paul McCartney

launched: 2011

project type: website

project with: HP

We were approached by Paul McCartney's team at MPL and their partners HP to do concepts and designs for the new PaulMcCartney.com and build a specialty piece to go along with it.

What was the occasion? HP was digitizing Paul's entire media collection (over 500,000 pieces of audio, video and photograph's spanning the length of Paul's career) for his private cloud.

Put Everything in Context

We decided right away that we did not want to make a big viewer in which the user can see all 500,000 photos. While it would look very impressive, the take-away for the user would be small, meaning the user would not really deepen their knowledge of Paul McCartney. So we made it a goal to give all media context.

In the Paul McCartney collection, users can view curated collections of the media with direct commentary from Paul and his team.

On the timeline users can view the content by year + get an idea of the progression of Paul's career through the media.

On the map users can view the content by location and even upload their own photos of Paul.

Reveal the Creative Process

Paul is really creative - he's been making music, art, photos and movies for over 50 years now, but what really blew us away in our research, were the moments where Paul lets you in on the creative process.

In the "chaos and creation at abbey road" film, there is a segment where Paul writes and records a song, playing all of the instruments, then singing over the recording. The crowd went wild.

In the Wingspan documentary, you see Paul just after the Beatles setting up his own studio in his living room, and later at his farm in Scotland. That was Rude studio.

We got the idea to create our own virtual rude studio, where the user could listen to and mix Paul's original tracks. Additionally the user can read commentary from Paul, Linda, the engineers, etc and view photos. This would let users in on the creative process in a very tangible way.

For us this piece was the perfect showcase for Paul's unique talents and HP's ambitious project, combining the creative with the archival to arrive at a fun and exciting experience for the fans.