There is a great review of the 1940 Chronicle project in Campaign magazine this week.

Here are the choice bits:

By Leon Jaume, executive creative director, WCRS:

‘In an otherwise ordinary week, we are lucky enough to end with a real star. It is 70 summers since the Battle of Britain raged above and the RAF Benevolent Fund is marking the occasion by trying to put us in the shoes of the people who live and fought through the war. It does this in two ways. One is an online version of a newspaper reporting real events each day as if we were in 1940. The other, bolder, strand to the campaign is inventing characters with specific roles in the Battle of Britain (plane mechanic, flying officer, nurse and so on, who Tweet daily as the battle unfolds and with whom you can engage. It’s one of the most powerful and least expected uses of social media I’ve yet seen. It’s also brave, ambitious and moving, and I love them for doing it.’

And by Tony Quinn, head of planning, JWT:

‘I’ve left the best until last. RAF Benevolent Fund. Loved it. Well planned, well thought out, a mine (oops) of rich and highly emotive content. I felt both moved and uplifted. I shed a tear and raised a smile all at once. It was like reading Sebastian Faulks but without the guff.’

I have been keeping a low profile for the past 12 weeks as I have been writing all the content for the project I referred to in my last post: www.1940chronicle.com. It’s one of the biggest and most demanding projects I’ve ever worked on: 90,000 words of historically accurate content in a very short research-and-write period. But of course the very fact it’s so demanding is part of what has made it so brilliant to do. Here is the ‘teaser trailer’ for the story:

This is a storytelling project which follows ‘in real time’ five fictional characters living through the Battle of Britain from June 21 to September 17. At the heart of it all is the Chronicle newspaper which breaks real news stories every day as though they were happening now: in effect June to September 2010 has become June to September 1940.

Each of the characters tell their own story through diary entries (blogs) once a week and via tweets every day. It is somewhere between a digital soap opera and a history lesson, a meeting of a social media novel and an historical re-enactment.

Let me introduce you to the characters. They are George, a Hurricane pilot, Jane, his wife who is also an RDF (radar) operator in the WAAF, Frank, an engineer, Alexander Rhodes, chief war correspondent for the Chronicle, and Mary, who is a nurse at East Grinstead Hospital assisting a remarkable plastic surgeon treating burns victims.

The project has been commissioned by the RAF Benevolent Fund (RAFBF) who are keen to raise awareness of their work and to get younger audiences involved in what they do. Digital agency Reading Room have worked closely with RAFBF and me to achieve what so far has been a very successful result. Soon after the campaign was launched, Stephen Fry sent out a tweet about it, which created a massive spike in the viewing audience:

stephenfry Fabulous real time blogging of Battle of Britain. You can relive 1940 day by day. A must. http://1940chronicle.com

The numbers, I believe, have continued to hold up well. This in part is due to some good press coverage in the Independent, Media Week, the Daily Mail and others. I hope that more and more people catch up on the story and follow it to its dramatic conclusion in September, just after Battle of Britain day on September 15.

Working on the project has made me think very hard about other possibilities for digital storytelling. I’m attending a Future Book event tomorrow evening to chat with some fellow practitioners of how stories can be told through digital media. I plan to post a report on that event, assuming there’s something interesting to report.

In the meantime: visit www.1940chronicle.com.

I am currently spending most of my waking life in 1940. I dream in black & white. I am working on a fascinating writing project for the RAFBF, conceived and designed by digital agency Reading Room.

I am so busy with this all-consuming project at the moment that I haven’t time to blog or do anything else much except write — more than 40,000 words in the last month, in fact.

I hope to finish at the beginning of July, when I will begin to resume, I hope, a more normal life, with a far more modest daily word count.

But for the time being, I am flying in Hurricanes, avoiding barrage balloons, smoking woodbines, buying food with my ration book and growing potatoes in the garden, and writing about all of it.

I will return to the present only when my own summer Battle of Britain is over.