Amnesia: THE CASE HISTORY OF A MULTIMEDIA MOCKUMENTARY

Amnesia

THE CASE HISTORY OF A MULTIMEDIA MOCKUMENTARY

Multimedia meets Radio – Praha 5-6 march 2009 Tiziano Bonini (RAI/IULM University - Italy)

FORMAT: AMNESIA

GENRE: MOCKUMENTARY/REALITY FICTION?

AUTHORS: MATTEO CACCIA, ALESSANDRO GENOVESI

DIRECTOR: TIZIANO BONINI

PRODUCER: RENZO CERESA

ASSISTANTPRODUCER: FABRIZIA BRUNATI

CHANNEL: RADIO2 RAI

SCHEDULED: MONDAY-FRIDAY 12:12-12:27 AM

AUDIENCE: 400.000 LISTENERS PER DAY (6.5% SHARE)

WEB ADRESS: WWW.AMNESIA.RAI.IT

WEB DESIGNER: LUCA CAMISASCA

PODCAST DOWNLOADS: 6-8.000 per day

ONLINE TRAFFIC: 24.395 weekly page views (29/09/2008- 05/10/2008)

Amnesia: what the Hell is this format?!?

Amnesia was thought to be scheduled in a time slot traditionally devoted to fiction but itsformat has broken the boundaries of fiction, blurring them into reality.

Amnesia is a radio mockumentary:

“Mockumentary is a genre of film and television. The mockumentary is presented as a documentary recording real life, but is actuallyFictional. The term "mockumentary" is thought to have first appearedin the mid-1980s when This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner used itin interviews to describe that film.The false documentary form has also been used for some dramaticproductions (and precursors to this approach date back to theradio days and Orson Welles' production of H. G. Wells' novel,The War of the Worlds)”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockumentary)

Amnesia is not only a mockumentary (some elements of reality)

The plot: Amnesia is the story of a young man, Matteo Caccia, a former speaker of the italian public radio, who he's suffering of a form of amnesia that has reset all his memories of his first 32 years of life to zero. Amnesia is the story of a man who is living every day as it was the first. Every day Matteo tells the listeners about his new life, using the languages of radio and multimedia.

Blurring fiction into reality

Elements of reality

the identity of the speaker isthe same of the main character

the programme is broadcasted live: It rings true. The speaker/actor makes some mistake

he repeats every day that this story is true

some national newspapers have publishedhis story giving for granted it is true

some details of his biography publishedon the website and on wikipedia are truesome characters are true (the voice of his grandmother)

there’s a kind of ambiguity on what's trueand what's false

Elements of fictionality

the memoirs are based on written texts and are traditionally dramatized using sound and music effects

there are narrative “bugs” all over the plot: a patient and careful ear could easily deduce that the story is false. but radio listening is episodic, it continuously shifts from foreground to background and the attention span of the listener is usually short

some details of his biography are false

most of the characters are fictional (but most of them are not actors; they are common people)

Amnesia as a multimedia project:

Radio (93.700 mhz)

Blog (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it)

Photo story telling (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it/foto)

Music (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it/playlist)

Video (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it/video)

Special audio/video podcast (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it/podcast)

illustrations/drawings/cartoons (www.amnesia.blog.rai.it/disegni)

Blog (3280 page views per week - 20-26 oct 2008)

why: as the the broadcast live ends, the blog is an effective place where to let this story go ahead; to let the listeners engage the debate around Matteo’s life; comment the story, take part in a dialogue with the character.

The speaker/charachter/author of Amnesia almost every day writes a post about issues related to his new life, hisnew point of view.Sometimes the posts follow up or expand the issue of thelast broadcasted episode, sometimes they are opinionsabout society and current affairs.

Photo (7002 page views per week – 29 sept. - 05 oct 2008)

Every day the authors and the assistant producer shot,chose, edit and upload on line some original photos.The images have been thought to be daily snapshots thatepitomize some details of the episode.The images are rather rough; there’s a “low profile”aesthetics in the way pictures are taken: with mobile phones,cameras, from weird perspectives, always hiding some partsof the subjects, in order to make them look like stolen images.We believe this aesthetics contributes to the “reality effect”of the story

Music (1716 page views per week – 29 sept. - 05 oct. 2008)

The music of the programme has a role in the plot: it is the music he found in his i-pod when he wake up fromamnesia. It tells something about his previous life.It is the music of his generation, people grown up in the '80-'90.Beside the music of his past there is also new contemporarypop music that he has discovered in the last year.

The playlist is composed by an original blend of classic rockand pop music of the '70-'80-'90 and contemporary alternativeindie/pop music.

Music has a main goal, to trigger:

- a sense of nostalgia/memories of youth - the discovery – out of curiosity - of new sounds

Every day the audiencecan re-listen on line to theplaylist broadcasted so far

Video (1122 page views per week – 20-26 oct. 2008)

Video gallery section contains the videos thatthe charachter recorded/is recordingfrom his wakening so far. The aesthetics is the sameof the photos: rough style, no postproduction, low-fiimage texture (use of mobile phone videocamera).The videos want to show brief moments of his new life,his rediscoverings, his first travels, his first rock concerts, but also very common moments of daily life,like doing bricolage at home.

Podcast (around 30.000 downloads per week)

Amnesia can be listened to both live and on demand

We produce two different kind of podcast:

1) traditional podcast: mp3 version of the broadcasted programme

2) special video and/or audio podcast: special contents for the passionate and more interactive listeners (fragments of off-air moments of the programme; readings of books quoted by the speaker on air; interviews with some of the best charachters of the programme ecc...)

25 oct 2008Amnesia is ranked 17th in theiTunes podcast chart

illustrations/drawings/cartoons

February series cartoonist January series illustrator

Starting from January 2009 we asked some italianillustrators and cartoonists to read the written texts of theradio play and give their free drawn version of Amnesia.This section of the website contains a gallery of all the drawings made by the artists. We have decided tohost a different “artist in residence” every month.In the next month we will host the first drawingsmade by one of our listeners (some of them havealready sent us spontaneously some of their works)

THE ROLE OF THE WEBSITE IN AMNESIA

The website is:

a continuation of the radio programme by other means(“War is the continuation of policy by other means”: Von Clausewitz)

an archive for disseminating additional informations about the identity of thecharachter and his story

a lively medium (the site changes as months go by)

a metamedium: a medium able to remediate different media languagesRemediation entails ‘the representation of one medium in another’, and is ‘a defining characteristic of the new digital media’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45).

Audience interaction in Amnesia

The paradox of radio: “Radio is too much cultural to be mainstream and too much mainstream to be cultural”(David Hendy, Bbc researcher)

We'd like to say that Amnesia audience is young, smart and open-minded.But this is not true. None of us can say who are our ideal listeners. But we dare say that we know two or three things about them:

- there are more women than men- in Amnesia coexist the traditional listener of the channel (45-54 years) and the fan of the programme (25-35 years)

The major part of the listeners take part into the programme in a traditional way, sendingsms and email during the live broadcast. They are satisfied by the 15 minutes of the radio programme.

But it exists a small portion of them – not only the younger ones – that wants more. They re-listen to the programme and its music; comment the blog every day;write email asking for more contents; send music, photo, drawings, suggestions, even presents for the speaker. They want to take part in the new life of Matteo, to be part of it,suggesting him places and things to do. Maybe the website is not so much web 2.0 oriented (not so much user generated content)but it's an experiment of translating a radio drama into a multimedia project, giving to themore passionate and active listeners the tools to enjoy the story in different ways.

The end