25th Estate: This is Where We Live

2009 sees the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate’s publishing.

In the summer of 2008, 4th Estate asked my company, Apt Studio, to create ’something stunning’ that would help them celebrate this anniversary, as well as celebrating books and their own ground-breaking, international, literary agenda.

Apt has worked with 4th Estate, and parent company HarperCollins, since 2002. Over the years, we’ve made a few films for them and also built the Fifth Estate blog that you’re reading this article on, as well as some other webby and creative projects – such as the recent Golden Notebook project for Doris Lessing.

Given this history we had a pretty open brief – just that whatever we did would touch on 4th Estate’s own history, as well as the sheer joy of books and the world they create.

We pitched a crazy, beautiful, and ambitious 3-minute animation to 4th Estate’s managing director, John Bond, and marketing director Ben Hurd. The animation would take place in a city made – literally – out of books, and we would pass through the city like a bird flying down the streets, witnessing scenes from these books taking place in lots of different districts over the course of an afternoon, evening and early morning.

Each district would loosely represent part of their publishing programme – from ‘Museum District’ made up of non-fiction, to the ‘edgy fiction’ part of town (Soho and the red light district) to the European cafe district in the early morning referencing work in translation.

All of the buildings and people would be made out of books, and the pages of those books, influenced in part by artists Thomas Allen and Su Blackwell.

For an added twist, the animation would feature only 4th Estate titles, and be shot ‘stop motion‘ – like Morph – at 15 frames per second. At three minutes long, that means we would have to set up and shoot 180 x 15 = 2700 separate photographs…

Luckily, 4th Estate loved the pitch and we teamed up with our mates at Asylum Films to put the film together. Over two weeks, more than twenty animators and model-makers worked with over 1,000 books to build a world, and an everycity made from the world’s literature. (You can see more production stills over at our blog, Times Emit.)

The film (’25th Estate’) incorporates works from many of 4th Estate’s acclaimed authors: Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fay Weldon, Simon Singh, Dava Sobel, Nigel Slater, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alaa Al Aswany, Giorgio Locatelli, Robert Fisk, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Francis Wheen, Alexander Masters, Joan Didion, Michael Chabon and many others.

My personal favourite moments are those of almost hidden detail: zebra crossings made from the paperback jacket of The Corrections; the Imperial War Museum modelled from Robert Fisk; the Greenwich Observatory made out of Longitude; the cinema made out of all the film tie-in editions, and the homage to The Corrections when the father falls out of the boat. The film is stuffed full of these references, and whilst they were a labour of love, they are (to me) what makes the film sing.

If you visit the site we’ve set up for the film you can also see a load of production stills, and time-lapse films of the animations being shot. And furthermore, it’s all been shot in glorious high definition.

Let us know what you think.

‘25th Estate – This is Where We Live’ – 4th Estate’s 25th Anniversary