We were lucky to catch up with Santino Vitale recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Santino, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

My father is an artist, so our house always had something creative going on in it. I’ve been told that I started drawing at a very early age so I truly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t being creative. But I do remember that when I was around four years old, my father showed me Ray Harryhausen’s ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ on VHS. The moment I saw the cyclops rampage out of the cave and roar at the camera, I knew I had just seen something special — but I didn’t fully understand what it was. At least, not yet. Within that same year, my father dug out the family video camera and showed me how stop-motion animation worked. To say I was mesmerized would have been an understatement. From then on, I would spend every waking moment either watching or attempting to make movies.
My focus was initially on animation. That process dominated my interest for most of my childhood and teen years. But as I grew older, I started to realize the joy of collaborating with actors and other creatives, and soon my goal shifted somewhat. I realized that the control I enjoyed with animation, the intricate design of every little detail, the engineering of each facet of production, had a live-action equivalent in directing. So in a sense, while I knew from essentially day one that I wanted to make films, the exact process and job description didn’t become apparent till I hit twenty or so.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Santino Vitale, I’m an independent film director and freelance visual effects artist in Ohio. As a freelancer, my job can be very complex at times, so when I meet new people at parties or events, if they’re not in the industry themselves, I’ll usually say something like: I’m one of those guys that makes green screens disappear (haha).

I got into VFX very much by accident. Given that I had a stop-motion background, and since it’s such a time-consuming art form, I found myself migrating more and more to a digital workflow for greater speed and the ability to produce projects with a larger scope. The side-effect of this, was that I learned digital software well enough that people began to ask me to do work for them.
So what started out as just a means to an end for my own projects, turned into a way to make a decent income from helping out on other filmmakers’ projects.

To rewind a little, I didn’t just jump into the industry. And living in Ohio, I’d say I’m definitely still operating on the fringes. I started out working a day job in retail back in 2013. I had graduated high school the year prior and I was working just to earn enough money to make my own short films. My coworkers all knew that I was into movies (I talked about it enough) and after a few years, my assistant manager Matt introduced me to his brother-in-law who had just started his own documentary film company Small Town Monsters. This was my real first break. Though it may sound small, working for that company not only allowed me to connect with a handful of other creatives in the state, but it did and still does provide fairly steady work.

Over the next several years, I would work two jobs and save enough money to make a short film here and there. Each one was a new challenge and I would use them to network with other better filmmakers than myself and learn as much as possible about the craft.

But when it comes to filmmaking, getting your foot in the door is absolutely the hardest part. And people often refer to it as “your big break,” as if breaking into the industry can be done in one big swing. In reality, it’s usually a series of little breaks, one after the other, over years worth of time and effort. At least in my experience.
My one bigger break was getting hired to help out with the effects work for the Shudder Original “The Mortuary Collection,” back in 2019. That film fell into my lap through total serendipity, like all opportunities I’ve ever gotten. The director, Ryan Spindell, had seen a short film I had made two years prior and contacted me about doing some basic compositing on his film. I of course jumped at the chance.
After that, I steadily got more work, expanded my skillset to include 3D rendering and animation as well as creature FX, and grew a small network of clients from which I could sustain myself.

But despite all that, I think it’s worth noting that all the biggest connections I ever made were from working on someone else’s project. I don’t feel that I’ve ever made something happen for myself, even though I have tried. So it really is like they say: helping others helps you.
All the opportunities I’ve gotten over the years all came from giving my time and skill to other filmmakers to help make their dreams a reality. Every single one.
Maybe it’s God’s way of keeping me humble? — probably. But I’m thankful to Him that I get to do what I do.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Through all the client work and hundreds of renders and revisions, I’ve never lost that initial spark of inspiration. My love of film and filmmaking is still very much at the core of what I do. So my underlying goal through all this is, and has been, to actually make real movies. To be a working director.

And more specifically, while I’d be ecstatic to make just about any film, my real passion is to make the kinds of movies that inspired me.
I grew up in the late 90s & early 2000s, watching classic cinema, Marx Brothers comedies, Universal Monsters, Spielberg, Harryhausen, and of course R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series. And it’s that old-fashioned presentation, that sense of wonder and mystery that I feel is largely missing in the film industry today — I want to bring that kind of filmmaking back for the next generation.

And I’m happy to say that I’m currently in the process of making that goal a reality. This year, I started my own film company Red Streak Films LLC, with the intent of producing a horror feature film under that banner. Subsequently, I’ve been working with a small team of really talented people to bring a script I wrote to the screen. We are currently in the early part of preproduction and if all goes well, we hope to be filming by this coming spring.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

For the film industry particularly, money talks. So when I hear audiences say that they’re tired of what Hollywood is putting out, when they say they want new IPs and fresh original stories, I expect them to show up when those rare films actually get made. The problem is, going to the movies is expensive and audiences are almost as risk averse as the studios these days. So when a great original movie comes out, the seats still remain largely vacant. And that’s a real shame, because it reinforces the idea that the audience just wants safe, predictable films — and that’s just not true!

So yeah, if people want to see original movies again, they have to turn out to see them. There’s no clearer message to Hollywood than a film doing well. I know the economy is rough for all of us, but movies are made for an audience. If there’s no audience, there won’t be movies. So that’s my sincere plea to film lovers everywhere: if you would, please watch more of the movies you want to see in the theater.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/srvfilms/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santino-vitale-0bb50b350
• Other: https://vimeo.com/user47143037