When Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple had the idea to make the documentary film Vitalik: An Ethereum Story, they were actually filming another documenta
When Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple had the idea to make the documentary film Vitalik: An Ethereum Story, they were actually filming another documentary, and over the course of their filmmaking journey, they ended up capturing both a deeper, human look at the world of crypto and an end product that serves as a use case for the future of crypto filmmaking.
When crafting a documentary, filmmakers will typically start with a vision of what they’d like to explore, a vision often saddled with a set of assumptions, only to shatter that vision once filming begins, creating an entirely new direction for the project.
It’s a creative evolution that filmmakers Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple also experienced while making the documentary feature This Is Not Financial Advice, during which they realized they had an entirely different film on their hands.
“While we were making that film, we wanted to interview Vitalik Buterin,” Ingrasci said to me during a recent interview. “We got connected to him, but as soon as we met him, we were really inspired by his unique form of tech optimism and how he broke stereotypes we’d had of the crypto space. He was a billionaire but very humble, funny, quirky and truly committed to his values of decentralization. That was very inspiring for us — so much so, we thought we should make a piece about Vitalik or about the Ethereum community at large.”
But Ingrasci and Temple weren’t crypto-native filmmakers — rather, they were individuals interested in technology and communities using technology in new ways, and Vitalik and Ethereum just happened to check both of those boxes.
The human touch in tech
Ingrasci and Temple then went out and launched a non-fungible token (NFT) crowdfunding campaign, raising almost $2 million in 50 hours, allowing them to get started quickly in the summer of 2021 during the height of the NFT boom.
“It allowed us to own the film without being beholden to any stakeholder, platform or middleman who would otherwise be directing the content of the film,” Temple said. “It was an amazing opportunity to spend over two years following Vitalik — a global nomad — all around the world.”
Temple and Ingrasci followed Buterin to Ukraine, Montenegro, Toronto and Colombia, trying to understand the man behind the technology. They even spent time with Buterin’s father and his family members, diving into the history of his family emigrating from Russia to Canada.
“We wanted to understand how Vitalik’s upbringing had affected his values,” Temple said. “We spent time talking with folks in the Ethereum community, with Vitalik’s friends and others, trying to paint this deeper picture and understand how the creators of crypto technologies affect the end product. How are they coding their values, blindspots and interests into the end result?”
From the beginning, Temple and Ingrasci’s main goal was to create a piece that would be accessible to a mainstream audience, one that could help translate some of the values and interesting things they were seeing in the Ethereum community in a way that a non-crypto native person could understand.
But they didn’t really know what that meant or what it would lead to initially since they were following different stories and different people within the Ethereum ecosystem. As they were editing the documentary together, they started testing it with people who knew nothing about crypto, who, as expected, were very confused.
“It’s so difficult to create a documentary that’s accessible and entertaining for people who know nothing about the crypto space, but we saw very clearly in the feedback from these early screenings that when people could connect to someone — especially Vitalik, who is so likeable and inspiring — it creates an entry point to then get into these more abstract concepts,” Ingrasci said.
“We did not set out to make the film only about Vitalik, and I don’t think the film is only about Vitalik,” Ingrasci told Cointelegraph.
“Vitalik is our human hook, our human story about someone who is going to surprise you, break your stereotypes about crypto, and leave you a little more excited than you thought you would be after watching this film.”
According to Ingrasci, Buterin’s favorite scenes in the film were when he was drinking tea or making breakfast — being his normal, quirky, funny self.
“That’s what makes this film entertaining, watchable and human,” Ingrasci said. “When someone is willing to be natural on camera with us as filmmakers, it creates a much more human story rather than this very intellectual version of Vitalik that we were already very aware of.”
Related: Institutions break up with Ethereum but keep ETH on the hook
Developing a crypto use case for film
During the filming of…
cointelegraph.com