We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Ragosta. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.
Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
Making a full-time living from creative work can be very challenging. There are many different paths and dimensions to how you can achieve a sustainable version of this lifestyle. For my personal journey, I was very fortunate to get an amazing job straight out of college. After two weeks of interning at Wreckless Abandon, a stop-motion animation company in East Granby, Connecticut, I was hired as a storyboard artist. From there I went on to do concept art and prop construction, as well as serving as the 1st Assistant Cameraman at the studio.
After close to two years at Wreckless, I moved to San Francisco where I worked in the Film Department of the Academy of Art, University. The benefits of working at a film school for six years were exponential. I made connections with hundreds of amazing people, many of whom have gone on to be incredible filmmakers. People that I met at the Academy pop back up in my creative work all the time. A few of the core crew connections that I made there led to an amazing opportunity that shaped half of my film career going forward.
It was through those Academy connections, namely Colin M Day (Saving Bansky) and Richard Enriquez (John Wick: Chapter 4, The Batman) that I was brought in to direct two preproduction featurettes for the Disney film John Carter. The first featurette was shot and created by our team in just four days and was extremely well received, leading to an amazing moment where one of my personal filmmaking heroes, Andrew Stanton’s (Wall E, Finding Nemo) one note was “not to touch a frame”. This led to a second, longer featurette that we called Barsoom 101, which utilized interviews with Andrew and co-writer, and fellow Pixar director, Mark Andrews (One Man Band, Brave) breaking down the all of the fantastical characters, creatures, and the world of Barsoom cut over as much of the incredible concept art from artists such as Ryan Church, Michael Kutsche, and Iain McCaig as we could cram into it. This video served as as an onboarding video for the cast and crew when they went into principal production. When it came time for Postproduction, my editor and longtime collaborator Albert Lopez and I were hired as full time editorial production assistants working in the production office with Andrew and his amazing team for over a year for me and two years for Albert.
During that time we got the chance to work closely with Daniel Gregoire, the founder of a company called Halon Entertainment who were working in the production office on-site doing the previsualization for the film. Dan was very impressed with the first featurette we had done which was centered around a really cool motion capture session featuring Mark Andrews performing as the white apes in the mobile mocap volume that Dan had set up in the office. Years later, Dan invited me to co-direct a series of featurettes defining Previsualization, Postvisualization, and Pitchvis for the Previsualization Society, featuring interviews with the heads of the top visualization companies as well as legendary creatives such as Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Mandalorian), Dennis Muren (ET, Jurassic Park, Star Wars I – VII), Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of a Third Kind), and producer Rick McCallum (Star Wars Eps I – III, Red Tails).
After that, Albert (as director, co-writer, and editor) and I (writer and cinematographer) made our first festival short, a romantic comedy kung-fu extravaganza called Love Hurts. It went on to win best short at the Urban Action Showcase, screening in the HBO Building in Time Square NYC and won the audience award at the Hollyshorts Film Festival at the TCL Chinese Theater in LA.
Next, our great friend Wes Sneeringer, another Academy connection, Albert, and I spent a year creating stop-motion animated shorts for Lego through Tongal, a web-based advertising studio. I served as writer, director, cinematographer, animator, and production designer. Albert served as co-director, picture and sound editor, as well as doing most of the voice acting work with Wes. The videos have millions of views on youtube as well as being available through Lego’s channel on Xfinity on Demand. We were also nominated for a Tongie (Tongal Awards) for our “Makuhero City Needs You!” short.
Next, I focused on writing and directing my own festival shorts, starting with Boy in the Dark (2017) before partnering with producer Marissa Garay (another Academy connection) on ZTV: Sympathy for the Devil (2019). ZTV went on to be nominated for several awards after premiering at Screamfest and playing Filmquest, Another Hole in the Head (Winner | Best Slasher / Splatter Short Film), Horrible Imaginings, and the South African Horrorfest (winner | Best Make-up FX). For ZTV I also wrote and illustrated the first issue of ZTV: Undead Empire, a comic book series that I will be continuing in the near future. ZTV is currently being developed as an episodic series that we hope to launch at some point in the future.
In 2020, when COVID hit, I was hired by Halon Entertainment, having multiple contacts there (Richard Enriquez, Albert Lopez, and Daniel Gregoire) and have spent the last three years working remotely as the Editorial Manager giving me the chance to work on blockbuster films such as John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Halon, which has since been acquired by the NEP Group and become an integral part of NEP Virtual Studios, is an amazing company at the forefront of Virtual Production, Visualization, and Finals Animation for Games.
Getting the job at Halon was a culmination of over a decade of making connections and establishing my reputation to deliver quality work quickly and efficiently. It can be traced all the way back to my first job at the Academy of Art University in 2003, seventeen years before. Working professionally in creative fields, in my experience is a marathon rather than a sprint. Its an exercise in patience and, for me, comes from a love for the work and the amazing people that surround you and challenge you on a daily basis.
The other half of my creative career, as a writer, director, received a major boost in 2021, when one fateful night on the Clubhouse App I found myself in a room with a dozen incredible filmmakers who would become family over the next year as we made a Horror Anthology Feature called Sinphony: A Clubhouse Horror Anthology. It was in this room that Sebastien Bazile (By Dawn, Sinphony) was impressed by our collective love of horror and suggested that we make a horror anthology funded by his and his partner Michael Galvan’s company Screen Anthology. Over the next couple of days we all submitted short scripts and a bunch of zoom writer’s rooms and production meetings later, we had signed contracts and received funds to shoot each of our shorts. Seven months from the first room we had a completed feature film, which received a Halloween limited theatrical, tiered Digital, DVD release in 2022 by Dark Sky Films, the horror arm of the MPI Group. It is currently available to watch with ads on TUBI and VUDU. The really cool thing about Sinphony is that each of my fellow filmmakers approached the genre from a completely different angle. My short Mother Love, was a kind of mix of Halloween and The Evil Dead and featured the amazing Kristine Gerolaga as a mother going above and beyond the grave to save her son from a clown masked killer.
Currently I have several features written and in various stages of development. This is, once again, a culmination of making and developing connections over many years. Three of my features are currently racing neck and neck to become the first feature I direct, I’m excited to see which one wins.
There are two major things I would have done differently that would have advanced my filmmaking career by at least 5-10 years. One, Albert and I should have made Love Hurts a feature. We had a great forty-five minute cut at one point and should have shot and cut in another twenty minutes to bring it over the line rather than cutting it down under twenty minutes to send it as a short to festivals. The second, is that if I had known how much money I would spend on the ZTV short (tens of thousands) I would have just shot the ZTV found footage feature script that I had written. Completing your first feature crosses a threshold in a film career that opens up all kinds of possibilities that shorts cannot. As far as proof of concept shorts go, I would recommend keeping them in the two to five minute range and spending $2-10K at the most, if possible.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
At my core I am a writer, director, producer (when needed), and Illustrator. I can write any kind of narrative fiction, but I currently specialize in horror/scifi.
I can write a short film in a day and a feature in a couple weeks after achieving an approved treatment. The fastest I’ve ever written a feature was in three days, which was an experiment I did when the COVID lockdown began and there was nowhere to go. That script is currently one of my favorites and one of the leaders for my first features to direct.
I am a professional illustrator/graphic designer who is hired to create posters for films and other types of projects as well as doing cover art and illustration for comic books.
I am also experienced in creating stop-motion animation as well as illustrating in layers for Motion Comic illustration.
Recently, I have also been sought after to design pitch decks for various productions which is also one of my primary duties as Editorial Manager at Halon Entertainment.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Please, please, please go to the theater to see movies opening weekend. As a filmmaker, there is nothing better than getting to see a film on the big screen. I’d recommend joining a theater membership, for example the AMC A-List, which I have a subscription to. It only costs $22 a month and lets you see three movies a week, including IMAX and Dolby Cinema shows. If you go once a month it pays for itself.
If we lose the theatrical experience, everything will be streaming, and some of the magic and spectacle of cinema will be lost forever.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
To tell great stories that reach in and grab people by the heart strings. This is why I push myself so hard when I write. If I’m not crying when I’m writing it i wouldn’t expect the audience to by feeling it when they watch it on the screen. My absolute favorite part of writing is when a character surprises me. I map everything out beforehand in outlines and treatments but I always leave room to follow the characters where they want to go, and you’d be amazed where a great character will lead you if they’ve been built correctly.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://halon.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonragosta/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ragosta-b211539/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonRagosta
- Other: IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4054708/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_0_nm_8_q_Jason%2520ragosta TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVpiwmPXATU&t=35s Lego Stopmotion: https://vimeo.com/showcase/5123879 TUBI | Sinphony: A clubhouse Horror Anthology: https://tubitv.com/movies/711074/sinphony-a-clubhouse-horror-anthology?start=true Previsualization Society Presents – Previsualization: https://vimeo.com/13626387 Previsualization Society Presents – Postvisualization: https://vimeo.com/27286430
Image Credits
ZTV BTS photos : Photographer Pavlo Fedorov Posters and Comic book art illustrated by Jason Ragosta ComicCon Photos by Curt Wiser