When Winter Comes

About

“When Winter Comes” is a short animated film created by Geoff Dunbar and his team, to illustrate the eponym 1992 song from Paul McCartney. The song, unearthed during the making of the “Flaming Pie – Archive Collection” project (released in 2020), was finally included on the “McCartney III” album in December 2020. The film was released on December 22, 2020 on streaming platforms.

At our office party last year I was chatting to my friend Geoff Dunbar, who I had made animated shorts with previously. I asked if he would want to make another film about using the song ‘When Winter Comes’. He agreed to do it and assembled a team of animators, who all happened to be women. I pointed this out to him and he said he wanted an all-girl band! The look of the video was very loosely based on some of Humphrey Ocean’s drawings of birds.

Paul McCartney – from Reddit conversation, December 23, 2020

‘Winter Bird’ was the reason I went in the studio first of all to do a little bit for the opening titles of a short film and then I was doing the end titles, the credits, another little instrumental for that. I liked what I did so much that once I’d finished the film bit, which was less than a minute in length, I then thought ‘OK let’s keep going’ and I started jamming on the same ideas but I lengthened it and then I started putting it on a guitar and drums and bass.

I just extended the idea because it opens with the original little thing that was for the film, we called that ‘Winter Bird’ and then the film that it was for was for a short animation film about the song ‘When Winter Comes’ so this is all full circle, so I’d come from the beginning of the album to the end and then we had the song that had started the whole thing so that’s ‘When Winter Comes’.

Paul McCartney, from NME, December 23, 2020

From paulmccartney.com, December 22, 2020:

The animated short film for ‘When Winter Comes’ is where McCartney III began. Paul explained during last night’s #TimsTwitterListeningParty:

The great thing for me about this album is that I didn’t know I was actually making an album and it all started with this track really. The music I was working on was for a short animation film about the song ‘When Winter Comes’. I made a record called ‘Calico Skies’ a while ago that George Martin recorded, and at the same time because I was in the studio, I just thought oh wait a minute there’s this other song I’ve just written, so I did ‘When Winter Comes’! This song is kind of an idealistic thing, a hippy existence on a farm, planting trees, mending fences and living the good life which is something I like. I love nature and I love that idea of getting down and getting your hands dirty.

The film adopts a painterly style glimpsing a family readying their farm for winter and highlights the themes of nature, family and home in the song. To create the short animated film, Paul enlisted the help of Rupert and the Frog Song director Geoff Dunbar for a unique hybrid of hand and digitally drawn animation.

The soundtrack for the film “When Winter Comes” contains the medley that ends the “McCartney III” album – “Winter Bird / When Winter Comes“. It also contains another track, used for the credits, and called “Winter Sun“; this piece of incidental music doesn’t appear on “McCartney III“.

Last updated on March 2, 2021