Long-Form Documentary Production
What Happened

More images View Video | Download PDF

The Challenge

From the mid-‘90s to 2000, the US economy’s most exciting growth industry was the dot-com sector. Seemingly overnight, hundreds of techno-entrepreneurs with a hot idea attracted millions of dollars of investment capital, fabulously enriching themselves and their original employees. And then again, seemingly overnight, it was all over. Billions of dollars of stock equity vanished. By the first quarter of 2001, the dot-com bubble had deflated and blown away in a strong breeze of lay-offs, closings, and bankruptcies. What in the world happened?

Mind & Media CEO Aldo Bello decided to find out and record what he discovered in a feature-length documentary. Along the way, Bello had to overcome two challenges that are intrinsic to documentary filmmaking:

• How to give the audience enough context to understand the central person or event
• How to maintain the audience’s interest in a topic that may be unfamiliar to them

The Solution

Bello understood that the keys to overcoming these challenges are expert storytelling, thorough research, and keeping the audience’s capabilities and limitations in mind.

Bello and his production partners, Chas Mastin and Michael LeFort, structured the documentary’s narrative to include only as much information as audiences would need to understand the technological and financial forces at work without overwhelming them with detail. In addition, the narrative was structured around a host/guide with whom audiences could identify.

The Results

The resulting 90-minute documentary, What Happened, earned numerous awards at film festivals around the country, including Best Director for Aldo Bello from the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.