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Welcome to The Lost Book, an animated web series following the adventures of investigative journalist Aileen and her dog Watson as they solve the crime of a stolen book. The six-part story was written by visitors to the website between January and July 2009 – anyone at all, of any age, anywhere in the world could join in.

You can watch the animation or find out about the cast and story if you’d like to catch up with Aileen’s adventures. There’s a downloadable press pack for journalists on our press and media page, along with links to articles about the project.

Or, here’s some background on how The Lost Book came about…

The Lost Book started in summer 2008 when Helen from Binary Fable had a cunning plan to combine her love of books with her animation work. She also thought it would be fun to get involved with the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature’s next reading campaign, and to do lots of online things with BookCrossing.com

Helen persuaded Adam, the other half of Binary Fable, that some sort of interactive books and animation project would be fun. Neither of them can remember quite how the conversation went, but they know they were walking down Princes Street in Edinburgh at the time.

By the end of that walk, The Lost Book had come to life. Helen wrote a script for the first episode, Adam drew some beautiful storyboards, and they started telling other people about the story.

Anna and Ali from the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature loved The Lost Book and snapped it up as a partner project to their next reading campaign, The Lost World Read 2009. They talked to all their other partners about the project…

…and before long the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had got involved. Lucy and Kirsten at the SCO offered to commission a composer to write the music for The Lost Book, and for their players to record the music: Alison, David, Donnie, Iain, Jane, Janet, Peter, and Su-a have played on episodes 1-5. As it turned out, three composers have been commissioned, so we welcomed Alexis, Blair and Michael to the team. Martin from the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Sound Design, and students Alex, Augoustinos, Gavin, Liam and Simon, will be holding music recording sessions for each episode.

Heather at BookCrossing.com also liked the sound of the project, and before long the BookCrossing folks were taking part in all sorts of discussions. They’ll be helping us promote The Lost Book and the BookCrossing book tracking website will make sure we don’t lose any more books!

In the meantime, various sponsors and funders had agreed to support the project. Two of them were so keen on The Lost Book that they have actually worked on it: Alan, Jackie, Jo, Mark and Simon at Front Page Design created the branding and the cute little tag logo; and Stuart from Henzteeth wrote most of the launch copy for this website – and trained Helen and Adam to write the rest.

Sound designer Stephen signed up early on, and started talking to Kahleen about casting. The perfect voice actors, Cora and Sean, agreed to take part in the project and recorded the first episode in November 2008.

Jasper agreed to write the prologue for the microstory competition – the competition to write the stolen book. He claims the competition is “The most interesting collaborative book-writing experiment of the decade”!

Another guest writer, Andrew, joined the microstory competition in June 2009, writing a 100-word installment of the stolen book and creating a catalogue entry for a mysterious artefact called the Ikhata.

Siobhan and Alan at Community Learning and Development at the City of Edinburgh Council are setting up community book groups to read The Lost World and will be getting their readers involved with The Lost Book. Andrea at Canongate is giving us some books to give away during the project. Philippa at the Scottish Book Trust contributed enthusiasm, support and advice, as did Beverley, Emma and Carol at the National Library of Scotland and Mark at New Media Scotland.

All these people have taken the story of The Lost Book and got it started. We’re now all hoping that you – all of you! – will join the team. There’s a whole web series to write and we need as many people as possible to take part in writing it. The Lost Book may have begun as one person’s dream, but it will come to life as a shared journey.