In the early 2010s, Italian film director and entrepreneur Piero Costantini surveyed the state of the industry and noticed an impending threat. Film production is increasingly moving from analog to digital, and Costantini, who specializes in post-production, has found that the industry is simply not equipped to manage the large amounts of data being uploaded to the cloud.
“There were storage issues,” Costantini told Variety. “At that time, there were no services that could handle such large amounts of data.”
Over the years Costantini worked in post-production, his hard drives kept adding up, his bookshelves were cluttered, and his basement was gathering dust. Files were easily lost or corrupted. Chaos reigned.
As digital transformation accelerates, Costantini realized that what he and filmmakers like him needed was a safe and secure platform to store and manage all those terabytes – to move them “from the basement to the cloud.”
In 2015, Costantini founded Mnemonica, an all-in-one content hub that he describes as a “living ecosystem of digital cinema.” The service provides a user-friendly cloud platform for film and television industry professionals to collaborate in real-time, allowing them to securely stream content, transfer files, and archive digital masters with a platform that can be accessed from desktops and mobile devices. Its ultimate goal is to provide a complete digital home for modern cinema, where you can conceive, create, share and store any work.
Since its launch, Mnemonica has supported approximately 1,000 titles, many of which are distributed globally on platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Sky, and Paramount+. To celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary this week at Rome’s MIA Market, Costantini, CMO Stefano Diana, and the Mnemonica team will host an event on October 9th to introduce Mnemonica Archive to industry guests. Mnemonica Archive is Europe’s first cloud solution specifically designed for active, long-term preservation of digital audiovisual content, according to the company.
Costantini called the launch “a pivotal moment for the preservation of our cinematic heritage.”
“This groundbreaking initiative fulfills Mnemonica’s mission as a technology of memory and… completes its function as a content hub for the global film industry. A space where works can be created, developed, circulated and remain timeless,” he says.
According to Costantini, since its inception, Mnemonica has positioned itself as a unique solution to the challenges faced by film industry professionals. That’s precisely because it’s “people from a movie background and a good understanding of what their needs are.”
The backbone of Mnemonica Production is a flexible architecture that helps centralize all stages of production, from casting and location scouting to camera testing, dailies, editing, and audio and video post-production, in a simple and secure platform. It also provides a VOD platform for film crews to view their completed films.
Diana, who has been with the company since its inception, points out that the platform’s strength is that it’s “not technology-driven. It’s real life-driven.”
“The design of this system was that we shouldn’t over-engineer workflows or processes, because we knew that an over-engineered platform wouldn’t be adopted by the real world[professionals]in real life,” says Diana. “They have their habits. They have their messy lives. They have to be very quick. They have to adapt.”
To this end, the platform was built with an understanding of the constant collaboration involved in film and television production, connecting people and departments in real-time. Integrated bi-directional data transfer allows users to exchange files of any size without leaving the platform’s secure environment, simplifying and connecting all stages of the production lifecycle.
Diana said this collaborative aspect underscores the company’s founders’ core belief that “data is only valuable when it’s shared.” “We wanted this platform to be a social network for film professionals centered around the media.”
Mnemonica Archive is the next step in furthering that mission. The service is designed to actively archive original assets in a structured environment that is accessible at any time, and was developed in response to the growing demand for reliability, accessibility, and security in the management of audiovisual files. This is to address the question of where assets are stored and how long they remain accessible in an ever-changing digital environment.
Moreover, Mnemonica Archive was conceived not only for archives, film libraries and institutions, but also for producers, broadcasters and streaming platforms. These organizations collectively focus on “the art of remembering,” as their name suggests.
Ten years after launching in Rome and gaining a foothold in Italy, Mnemonica is now ready to expand, with plans to expand to the UK, Spain, France and Germany over the next two years. As the first Italian company to win the Creative Europe MEDIA Innovative Tools and Business Models grant, Costantini asserts that “now is the time to go international”, furthering Mnemonica’s mission to “preserve the film heritage of European countries”.
“We want to be the archive for all independent production companies and keep our digital platform in the cloud, not in the basement,” he says. “The basement is exploding. There is no more space, and there is no chance for content owners to sustain this situation. The problem is real and urgent right now.”
MIA Market in Rome will be held from October 6th to 10th.
