In the early 2010s, when Italian filmmaker and entrepreneur Piero Costantini studied the state of the industry, he saw a looming threat on the horizon. Film production was increasingly shifting from analog to digital, and Costantini — who specialized in post-production — recognized that the industry simply wasn’t equipped to manage the massive amounts of data being uploaded into the cloud.
“There was a problem of storage,” Costantini tells Variety. “There were no services to handle such a big amount of data at that time.”
Throughout his years working in post-production, Costantini had accumulated more and more hard drives, which had begun to clutter his bookshelves and gather dust in his basement. Files were easily lost or corrupted. Chaos reigned.
As the digital transformation gathered speed, Costantini realized that what he and filmmakers like him needed was a safe, secure platform to store and manage all those terrabytes — 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 that enables film and TV industry professionals to collaborate in real time, allowing them to securely stream content, transfer files and archive digital masters, utilizing a platform that’s accessible from any desktop or mobile device. Its ultimate goal is to provide a complete digital home for contemporary cinema, where every work can be conceived, created, shared and preserved.
Since its launch, Mnemonica has supported roughly a thousand productions, many of which have been distributed globally on platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Sky and Paramount+. Celebrating the company’s ten-year anniversary this week at Rome’s MIA Market, Costantini, CMO Stefano Diana and the Mnemonica team will host an event Oct. 9 to introduce industry guests to Mnemonica Archive, which the company describes as the first European cloud solution designed specifically for the active and long-term preservation of digital audiovisual content.
Costantini calls the launch “a pivotal moment for the preservation of our film heritage.”
“This groundbreaking initiative fulfills Mnemonica’s mission — the art of remembering — and…completes its function as a content hub for the global film industry: a space where a work can be born, develop, be distributed and live on over time,” he says.
Since its inception, Mnemonica has been positioned as a uniquely tailored solution for the challenges facing film industry professionals, precisely because it was designed by “people coming from film, so understanding quite well what their needs were,” according to Costantini.
The backbone of Mnemonica Production is a flexible architecture that helps to centralize and manage all stages of production on a simple and secure platform: from casting and location scouting to camera tests, dailies, editing, audio and video post-production — even offering a VOD platform for film crews to watch their finished work.
Diana, who has been with the company since the beginning, notes that the strength of the platform is that it’s “not technology-driven. It’s real life-driven.”
“The design of the system was that we should not over-engineer workflows, over-engineer processes. Because we had seen that over-engineered platforms would not be adopted by actual cinema [professionals] in their real lives,” says Diana. “They have their habits. They have their messy lives. They have to be very quick. They have to adapt.”
To that end, the platform was built with an understanding of the constant, collaborative work that goes into film and television production, connecting people and departments in real time. Its integrated two-way data transfer allows users to exchange files of any size without leaving the platform’s secure environment, simplifying and connecting all phases of a production’s life cycle.
That collaborative aspect underscores a core belief from the company’s founders that “data has value only when shared,” according to Diana. “We wanted this platform to be a social network of cinema professionals that meet around media.”
Mnemonica Archive is the next step in furthering that mission. Designed for the active archiving of original assets in a structured environment that’s accessible at any time, the service was developed in response to a growing demand for reliability, accessibility and security in the management of audiovisual files — to address the question in our ever-shifting digital landscape of where assets are stored and for how long they’ll remain accessible.
Moreover, Mnemonica Archive was conceived as much for producers, broadcasters and streaming platforms as for archives, film libraries and institutions — bodies collectively focused on “the art of remembering,” as the company’s name suggests.
Ten years after launching in Rome and securing a foothold in Italy, Mnemonica is now ready to expand its operations, with plans to roll out in the U.K., Spain, France and Germany in the next two years. As the first Italian company to win the Creative Europe MEDIA Innovative Tools and Business Models grant, Costantini insists that “this is the moment to go international,” furthering Mnemonica’s mission to “preserve the cinema heritage of European countries.”
“We want to become the archive for all the independent production companies — to store their digital platforms in the cloud, instead of using the basements,” he says. “Basements are exploding. There is no more space and there is no chance to sustain this situation for content owners. The problem is actual, it’s current, it’s urgent.”
Rome’s MIA Market runs Oct. 6 – 10.
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