AUCTION HOUSE TO THE STARS
JULIEN*S
THE STORY
Julien’s is a one-of-a-kind auction house in the USA. Based in Los Angeles, they’re the leading auctioneer for all things music, film and pop culture. They’re renowned for doing things differently and more importantly, they’re trusted by the world’s biggest names to look after their legacy and tell their stories.
THE BRIEF
We’ve been working with Julien’s on their UK activity since 2023 and they’ve trusted us with some of the biggest activation videos for their auctions in that time. And when we say biggest, one of them was an actual bus!
The first project we were approached for was a special one as Paul McCartney’s Wings Tour Bus was up for sale, so the requirement was to film on it as it travelled across London revisiting some historic sites from Paul McCartney’s past.
The second brief was one that took us back to London to film with boutique fashion designers palmer//harding who had been commissioned to create a piece inspired by an iconic Princess Diana dress.
Both shoots would require full production with multiple cameras across the days for filming and careful storytelling to ensure that they celebrated the history of the subject but also explored the context of the sale and how Julien*s were going about delivering it.
THE SOLUTION
For Paul McCartney’s Wings Tour Bus, we partnered with our long-time client Hard Rock Cafe Piccadilly Circus to base the activity of the day from. We began with a multi-camera interview chat between Martin Nolan and Freda Kelly - the former Beatles secretary - who knew Paul McCartney better than almost anyone. Our camera teams then split off as one accompanied Freda and a select group of competition winners on the bus which travelled around the city to visit iconic locations. The other team set off on foot to capture the bus as it arrived at each place. As we went we gathered B-roll and run-and-gun interviews with Freda. The finished deliverables were a suite of content that explained the significance of the bus as well as celebrated the importance of it culturally in Paul McCartney’s history as one of the greatest song-writers of all time.
Our solution for palmer//harding was a very different (and much less mobile) one. Our crew travelled to London again to the designers’ studios in Hackney. There, we met Levi Palmer and Matthew Harding, the founders of the label. We felt it was very important to tell their story within the film that we delivered as well as provide insight into what collaborating with Julien*s meant for them. Their bespoke, one-off-commission, inspired by Princess Diana’s style (curated by Catherine Walker) was a mixture of their own personal and professional journeys juxtaposed against the fashion legacy of an icon; so the narrative we found reflected that. In addition to this, throughout our capture of B-roll, we wanted to get a sense of the palmer//harding creative process and their attention to detail, which is why there is a concentration on close ups of both Levi and Matthew designing, drawing and working with fabric to illustrate their creative process against the story of what this collaboration means for them.