Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink – Looking At the People Behind the Cyber
- PopEntertainment
- Mar 29
- 7 min read
Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink
Looking At the People Behind the Cyber
By Jay S. Jacobs
The Web3/Cryptocurrency world is shrouded in mystery to the average consumer. What’s the deal with Bitcoin? How is Web3 different? Why are NFTs so expensive? Who are the people behind the technology?
Documentary filmmakers Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink were as in the dark as many others, and they decided to do something about it. Therefore they decided to encamp in the CSS school and meet the people trying to break into the business. They learned a lot about technology.
However, they quickly found that the people were the most important part of the equation, which led to their film Any Problem is No Problem. They took deep dives into the lives of three teams of prospective cyber execs, who went through a huge seminar competition to win funding for their nascent techno businesses. However, it was not just about the business side, they also learned so much about who the people were, and where they came from.
A week or so before Any Problem is No Problem was set to be the closing night film at the 14th annual American Documentary and Animation Film Festival (AmDocs), we caught up with Fedele and Fink to discuss their film.
Were you originally drawn to the school or the students when you started planning this film?
Alyssa Fedele: Both. The school is really interesting in that, for this particular cohort, they were bringing in companies that are developing in the Web3 space, which was a side of the crypto technology that we were just learning about as we were looking into the project. We found that really, really fascinating. They had 8000 applicants to this school, and they picked 26 teams. Then we looked at those 26 teams, and met about half of them, and ultimately ended up featuring three in the film. That was a combination we were looking for. First of all, people in this high-stake environment who were willing to be filmed as well. Also we were looking for people and companies who were solving real world problems that we felt like a general audience could understand as an entry point into this nascent and pretty complex technology space.
Like you said, there were 26 teams. You started out going with about half and then got it down to the three. How did you decide on the three? Did you focus on those students from the beginning of the filming, or did you do deep dives on all of them and figure out which stories made the most sense to tell once you were editing?
Zachary Fink: We had about three or four weeks leading up to the beginning of the accelerator to meet as many people as we could, and so we did kind of what we're doing right now. We did Zoom interviews with a lot of people. We read up about them. We chatted with them online. We got to know them a little bit. We tried to understand what the technology was that they were building. As Alyssa mentioned, some of it can be very complex, and we're not experts in the space. We wanted to make sure that we could understand what they were working on, so that we could be able to present that to a general audience as well. This film is really not tech specific. It's made for a very broad audience. We did a lot of our casting, as it were, over Zoom prior to the start of the accelerator. We started with five teams in terms of the filming that we were doing on location when the accelerator started. Over the course of the first couple of weeks, we just realized that we were perhaps spreading ourselves too thin to try and cover five teams, so we pulled back to three at that point.
All the students shared information on their private lives, their friends, their families and their histories beyond just their professional aspirations. How do you feel that we get to know them, and that makes their business story more intense or more relatable?
Alyssa Fedele: The thing that we can often lose sight of is that technology comes from people. We all have a drive and a motivation in our lives to solve a problem or create something or engage in the world in a unique way. So we wanted to take that approach in this film, to really look at these young coders and say, “okay, crypto sometimes gets a bad rap in the media, what is this about? What is really motivating them, from a personal perspective, to work in this space?” That really drove us in the storytelling working with them. We explained that to everyone from the start as well because it's important that they know that that's where we're going. This isn't just going to be about business. We're interested in who you are and what's driving you to do this work, because ultimately, that's how to connect to audiences.
Like you just said, crypto often gets a bad rap. People think it's shady or something of a scam. What did you learn from making this film to change your mind, and what do you think the viewers will take from this film about the whole cyber world?
Zachary Fink: What was really fascinating for us was to really come to understand that the crypto space has two sides. It has the cryptocurrency side, and it has the Web3 side. Both of these elements are built on the blockchain. They're built on this underlying infrastructure. We didn't really fully understand that going in. We're not technologists. We're not web developers. While the crypto side of the technology, the currency side, has this reputation for being a little untoward or scammy in a lot of ways, the same technology that's powering that could power this major revolution in the future of the Internet by developing what has become known as Web3. We're thinking that we're all in the Web2 space right now, but there's this future that's coming that has more of a decentralized internet. Where all of the users are going to be able to own their own data, rather than that data being owned by the large tech companies. That was a really thought-provoking and interesting perspective for us to follow in the film, because it's a very idealistic view of the future of the Internet that these young coders are developing now.
The school was interesting because it almost treated its teaching as an advanced seminar course. What was the world of CSS like to experience as a bit of an outsider?
Alyssa Fedele: We learned a lot about Web3 and about the crypto space. It was also fascinating to see these businesses going through the accelerator. Developing their companies and developing their pitches. Ultimately, what we focus on in the film is the way that the incubator space helps them hone what their businesses do and how to pitch it at the demo day at the end of the incubator. They would be pitching their business to a room full of investors for the opportunity of tens of millions of dollars of investment in a moment that could make or break the future of their companies. We grabbed on to that aspect of the program and followed that thread.
Like any documentary, it takes time to make and certain small things in the film have a different meaning now than they did when it was filmed. For example, when Chris is let into his Tesla by his mother’s app and he appreciatively says, “Thanks, Elon.” Or when Brandon made a list of musicians he wanted to collaborate with, and Kanye West was right at the top of the list. When rewatching the film, are there things like that which have changed which stand out to you, either in a positive or negative way?
Zachary Fink: Documentaries, by virtue of their time-based recording, are little capsules in time. I think it's really important to recognize that it's not a living document. You're looking at historical documents in a lot of ways. (to Alyssa) What do you think?
Alyssa Fedele: I think one of the things that's really interesting about this capsule in time is that it was a crypto winter when we made the film, and leading up to that, [there] had been a crypto boom. Since that time, there's been another crypto boom, and maybe a tempering now, we don't know. As with any technology, especially in the early years, there are booms and busts. It's really exciting. We were a little bit worried about that when we were making the film, but having seen the cycles repeat themselves, I think that it will always be an interesting take on what happens in a nascent technology space.
How did the two of you originally get into documentary filmmaking, and how do you choose your subjects?
Zachary Fink: We have backgrounds in cultural anthropology. We really got into films from an ethnographic documentary perspective. One of the things that we strongly believe in is participant observation, this idea of really embedding ourselves into the lives of our protagonists. Spending as much time with them as possible as we document their lives unfolding in front of the camera. In that regard, we really feel like we're using the camera as a tool of discovery, rather than pre-scripting the story before we film it and then going out and capturing images and sounds to put into our idea. Our goal is always to present the story from the perspective of our protagonists, so that people understand where they're coming from.
One last question, do you have anything coming up in the future that you're working on now?
Alyssa Fedele: We have two other projects that we're working on right now. One is a series about the inventors of AI, and then the other is a feature documentary that is a coming-of-age story following a young cowboy in Colorado as he attempts to go pro in bull riding.
Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: March 29, 2025.
Photo 1 ©2025 Jay S. Jacobs. All rights reserved.
Photos 2-4 ©2025 Courtesy of LFG Productions. All rights reserved.
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