01/12/08

25th Estate: This Is Where We Live (4th Estate)

At last! We can show you the awesome project we were working on earlier this summer.

Press Books – the literary division of HarperCollins, containing 4th Estate and Perennial – approached us in the summer, asking us to come up with ideas for helping them celebrate the forthcoming 25th anniversary of imprint 4th Estate.

We’ve done lots of work for Press Books before – from films for Londonstani and their 2006 Catalogue – to consulting on Authonomy, and producing the recent Golden Notebook experiment (and their blog, FifthEstate), and this was a great way to build on that relationship.

The anniversary will be taking place throughout 2009, with a load of events and some special editions of some of their landmark titles, such as The Shipping News, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, The Corrections, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Half of A Yellow Sun.

So we teamed up with Ben and Jos from Asylum and made them this film.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

The whole thing is made up of 4th Estate books (both in original hardback formats, and their later paperbacks), and bits of those books. It was shot in full HD, using stop-motion animation, all done in camera. Over 1,000 books were, sadly, harmed in the production of this film. (They were, however, recycled – although some of them are still in our offices.)

Personal favourite moments:

35 seconds – The Imperial War Museum, made out of Robert Fisk’s The Great War For Civilisation
41s; The Corrections used for a zebra crossing
46-48s; The man and the dog pause for the lamppost; the skateboarder wiping out; the National Gallery made out of Eric Sykes
52s; The Greenwich Observatory made out of Longitude
102s; Alfred Lambert falling off the boat (from The Corrections)
105s; Beyond Black Hoover in St Paul’s
110s; The man Fishing on The Perfect Storm
115s; Cop chases robber down the alley in Soho

OK. I’ll stop now. I urge you to watch it in Hi Definition, full screen if you can.

The film is part of 4th Estate’s Christmas Card, and we built a site to house it, along with some production stills and time-lapse animations of the animations being shot.

More in the Portfolio, and on FifthEstate

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Posted by Peter Collingridge in Publishing.