25th Estate, the film (above) created for 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, has already had over 250,000 views, and been blogged about by Kanye West.

Whilst higher accolades are hard to come by, we do have some great news of increased recognition from the film world.

The film, created with our dear friends at Asylum Films, have been accepted into the following festivals:

• Running this week at the South Bank BFI uber-hip ONEDOTZERO asked us specifically to take part in their CRAFTWORK 09 section

16th BRADFORD ANIMATION FESTIVAL.

• Asylum’s Jordan says, “Its like the Annecy of Britain, big deal in animation, this is the website . We did rather well at Annecy
• Anim’est 2009. We are in competition for Best Advertising
• Selected for the Prix Arts in Linz, Austria where we are screening as part of the Inner / outer Worlds section.
• This joins our many festivals already including SHORTS, SOHO, Portable, Portobello….

And, in case you missed it, here is another film we made with Asylum to promote Enhanced Editions‘ launch of Nick Cave’s new novel The Death of Bunny Munro as an iPhone app.

A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a short URL from any YouTube page. Check it out. If it all seems a bit confusing, here’s a quick tutorial:

More details after the jump.

These are some production stills from a couple of sequences in the film for 4th Estate, which will be out early next year.

The Market: Wide view (see stills camera at the front)

This stall actually has minature versions of the 4th Estate titles in the shot. The statue is made of lego.

Working out the animation. Note Individual character animations on the brown card.

Silly hat day on set. By set we mean converted front room in Harringey. With 9 animators, art directors and modelmakers sleeping on set for 2 weeks.

Working out the shots for the museum district. Things were simpler then.

Home-made dolly for the rising camera in the final sequence. Note MacBook Pro in background taking time-lapse of entire shoot.

But – my point?

Firstly – the script on this show is so damn good that you just don’t notice it. Or at least, I didn’t until Season Five, when the writers (David Simon in particular) couldn’t resist making a hero out of the sub-editor at the local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. (It was the same on the West Wing in the early days: it was always the writers – Sam Seaborne, Toby Ziegler – who were the real heroes. Don’t they know the joke?). But it’s pretty awesome to watch something – I devoured the episodes back to back – and not flinch at something or other.

Next. After watching the final episode, I found myself in real need of some web community support. What I wanted to read were comments, as opposed to long bloggy rants.

My first stop was the Freakonomics Blog, where for the past 8 weeks, they have carried “interviews” with real “hoods” as to what they think of The Wire. Some of the comments on these interviews have been amazingly smart, some of the best, sustained, comments I’ve read on a site – not that surprising given the kind of visitor the NYT-hosted site attracts.

But, sadly, when I got there, I found out that the “hoods” had ducked out from reviewing episodes 9 and 10. Which was a bit of a cop out. So I found myself googling for reviews only pulled up blogs, but in this case I wanted some real, published journalism. I found the NY Times, the Washington Post, and (ironically) the Baltimore Sun. Of them all, The Washington Post gave me enough to iron out the kinks and confusions.

Finally. Quite a few of the comments on the Washington Post page talk about how, after a show is this good, the only way forwards is to “go back to the books”

Those of us lamenting the end of “The Wire” would do well to remember that it was the writing that made it so good. Check out the books of contributors David Simon, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price. I particularly commend you to the books of Pelecanos, who writes crime fiction set in the mean streets of DC.

From which I draw a couple of things: people think books (and specifically, the books of the show’s writers, published in some of the best UK independent houses, by the way – but I think they’re talking about books in general) are the place to go to get great stories (truth ‘dat); secondly, great writing really gets noticed, even if it takes years; and finally – I’m really going to miss this show.

We got funding for five films, and the first one (for a book I was then editing, the collected lyrics and poems of Gil Scott Heron was produced in 1999, designed by Julian House at Intro.

Sadly, tho, it never saw the light of day until very recently. Why? We also completed our Life of Pi promo, which was a giant, 8 MB download (huge at the time). This got thousands and thousands of views a day, and tanked Canongate’s bandwidth limit. They had to start paying over the odds to keep the promo up there. (Ooops. You learn). As a result, both were taken offline until a “sponsor” for bandwidth became available, or until bandwidth became free, and by which time, I’d left the company, and we’d all missed the boat.

Anyway, along came YouTube and we put it up there in 2006. My reason for posting is that it’s just had its 200,000th view, which isn’t great shakes (the Pi promo had over 2.5m views on a number of different sites, but has had very few on YouTube – probably because it’s also a game) – but we’re proud none the less.

You can view it on YouTube here – and enjoy the pretty regular comments. Or you can look at the hi-res version below, straight from the source. (It’s quite old now – 8 years – so it can be a bit tetchy. Maybe easier to watch in a new window.

You can also see the Life of Pi promo introduction below, or here in a new window – again recommended.

If you’re interested in other promos we’ve done, try these:

The Baghdad Blog, Salam Pax
Hey, Nostradamus!, Doug Coupland
Lunar Park, Brett Easton Ellis
The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
For One More Day, Mitch Albom

This time he’s taken as his theme the new digital (dis)order, as described in David Weinberger’s excellent recent book Everything is Miscellaneous.

We’ve been talking a lot about tagging and similar strategies recently, trying to see how it is valuable, if and why it should be used. The phrase “allowing the information to find us” is a good summary of one of the things we’re trying to achieve in some of our recent work.