We recently connected with Joshua Sterling Bragg and have shared our conversation below.
Joshua Sterling, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Social media seems to take the same course every time a new platform is developed, and now that I’m seeing the pattern emerge on tiktok I’m starting to make a shift that will change how I interact with social media for the rest of my career.
I was lucky enough to feel inspired to jump on tiktok at a critical point in its growth, about 6 months into it’s growing popularity in the US. I had some success on YouTube and with my podcast (all under the name Haunting Season) and I thought I could give short form content a try. It went well, I got addicted to the enormous numbers and before long I had a quarter of a million people following me. I had never experienced that sort of success with anything that I’ve done. And then the rules changed. Suddenly my content wasn’t performing as well, there were rumors about shadow banning, and rumors about how often you needed to post, and whether or not you should do the creator fund. I followed every lead I could until suddenly BAM I was BACK baby! I rocketed up to 400,000 and then WHACK, even worse than before… I hit a wall. And I’ve been staring at that wall for six months now. I’ve been pumping out content, a video per day, upwards of 18-20 minutes of written, filmed, edited and produced content that I’m not getting paid to make, that I am creating in my spare time – ALL of my spare time mind you – And I was addicted. Like a sad smoking slot machine player, I was dumping all of my creativity into the machine and for what?
Well it wasn’t for nothing, I was given loads of free stuff, invited to movie premieres and private events, early access to books and films, and the best part was being recognized by people at conventions and all the wonderful thank you notes I would get. And then it dawned on me… everything I had been working towards was starting to form it’s own community. People were recognizing me, yes, but recognizing each other in the comments.
Eventually – and recently I might add – I reached the point of burnout. I had more videos filmed than I could edit, I had enough edited to last me the rest of the year, but I wasn’t (and I’m still not) getting the visibility that used to make it all worth it. And that’s when I took a break. I packed my bags and took my wife to a cabin in the woods where for 10 days I had no access to the internet, and what came out of that incredibly healing time away was a desire for two things.
1. To focus a lot of energy on building my community and nourishing the connections that I have been so lucky to make over the past few years.
2. To no longer make the content I think others want me to make, but to instead focus on making things that I want to make. This includes films – short and feature length – video essays, vlogs and short stories.
These are the meaningful projects that I am pouring myself into that will change the stress and anxiety of pumping out a high quantity of content on a regular basis, and turn it into joy for creating more meaningful content on a much looser and more manageable basis.
I think in this age where anyone can find their fifteen minutes of fame with just a cell phone and wifi connection it is SO IMPORTANT to ask yourself, what do you want to be remembered for? And for me, that’s creating a strong, active and safe community that embraces all people who love horror and science fiction, and creating meaningful content that contributes to people’s lives in some positive way.
Joshua Sterling, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a filmmaker. I started filming short films with my brother in high school, but it wasn’t until two years after college that I found my path to my career as a documentarian and… well this sounds weird, but… and a horror host of sorts. Let’s rewind.
I met a filmmaker by the name of Ryan Gielen back in 2011. I had been invited to watch his first narrative feature film, and afterwards we talked for over an hour. At the end he offered me a job as an intern, selling his DVD on the boardwalk in Ocean City Maryland, and I took it. I was two years out of college and my greatest accomplishment was making a 2 minute stop motion video with Legos in my parent’s house, so this felt like a logical step up.
I spent the summer working hard, earning my percentage of sales, bonding and all the while spending my spare time shooting and editing videos that we would then screen on the CRT TV after dinner. It was a life changing experience, and it ended up resulting in my first job at a production company in New York City with Ryan’s brother Matt. Our bread and butter at that company was making youtube videos for males 18-34, and it was about January of 2013 that Matt and I agreed to collaborate on a new project called Haunting Season.
It started with me standing in a black void, telling a story straight to camera about the time me and my friends explored an abandoned building and thought we ran into a ghost. The video did well, and because I had limited stories to tell pertaining to real life hauntings, I quickly pivoted to writing horror fiction. Every Friday for two years I posted a new chapter or a new story, and over those two years we grew to 16,000 followers. And that’s when I got my next opportunity.
On the side, in addition to roller derby and Haunting Season, I had also been freelancing with Ryan, making corporate videos. But a project he had been working on was taking off and was calling him to Los Angeles and he needed someone to take over his New York client list (under supervision and guidance of course.) I got Matt’s blessing and shifted into the exciting world of freelance filmmaking. Haunting Season became hard to keep up with. I struggled to find the time every week to write, perform, film, edit and deliver a 15-20 minute video, and the channel quickly became dormant.
Years passed, but in those years I worked hard, I earned my keep, and when what Ryan and his business partner Patrick James Lynch were working on became real, they hired me as their Head of Production at Believe Limited.
At Believe we create entertainment that affects change, focusing on the stories of people with rare diseases and disorders. This work has taken me to twenty countries, and all across the united states, and as our employee list grew from just four of us to now fifteen, I’ve continued to work my way up the ladder as a member of the leadership team, and as Senior Creative Director.
As our work in rare diseases and disorders found its footing, we started to wonder how to get our feet back on the entertainment door, and Haunting Season was a natural first step. We brought it back as a podcast, and started posting to youtube again. And eventually, right around the time of covid, I discovered tiktok and skyrocketed to a much larger audience.
Haunting Season, now, mostly exists on tiktok and instagram as a way for me to talk about films, books and tv within the “spooky” horror and scifi realm, but that’s starting to shift again even now. I’ve build a strong following across all my platforms of nearly half a million followers, and I am well into taking my next step towards turning Haunting Season into a full fledged production company that will produce short and feature length films, have it’s own private community of creators and friends, and will continue to be a place for me to express myself creatively as a writer, performer and host.
Because of my background in filmmaking and documentary, I approach everything from live events coverage, to movie reviews, and any form of client work with a desire to tell a meaningful story that will resonate with people on a human level. I am an avid mental health advocate, an ally, and a friend to all those in fringe communities, and I see tremendous value in people coming together to share their joy, their love and fascination with the types of stories that resonate with them.
Because I have a career that I love and that pays the bills, I am lucky enough to not have to rely on money from haunting Season to pay the bills, and so any extra work that comes in from my presence on this platform goes into creating stronger material, and helping me to find the support I need to keep it going (like hiring an editor, a purchasing supplies to make a film, or hire actors).
I am currently putting the finishing touches on a feature film script, while outlining four others. I am drafting short film ideas, while in pre-production for two others, and post production for two more. I am reviewing books and films, I am documenting my journey, and I am building out my private community through patreon with affordable tiers that make it accessible for people who want to help Haunting Season grow and connect with collaborators from all sorts of creative backgrounds.
Through the community we’ve been sharing our love of horror and scifi, but also supporting each other creatively through highs and lows, and through collaborating on scripts, marketing plans, board game designs and by celebrating accomplishments.
I love what I do, and I love how I got here. It wasn’t an easy path, but with hard work and dedication, and knowing when to walk away and when to come back, I’ve been able to balance my hobby with my work in a way that has gotten me to this critical point of growth.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
We need the arts. Films, TV, Books, Plays, Paintings and everything in between – the arts culture us, show us the world from the perspective of others, and help us to face some of life’s hardest concepts. The arts are also, culturally, what we most occupy our time with these days, and businesses know it. Podcasts, tiktoks, shows, films, books, we’re in an over-saturated culture of ingesting media and content, and it’s only growing. AI, AR, Chat GPT and CGI – there are so many new forms of creating things for us to blind ourselves with on a daily basis, keeping us locked in perpetual stagnation as our brains try to figure out “WHY AM I NOT ENTERTAINED!? I’VE BEEN STARING AT THESE SCREENS FOR HOURS!”
When it comes to thriving in the digital media space, in a creative environment at all, there are only two relevant questions that you need to consider:
1. What am I contributing to society with what I am making or want to make?
2. Is what I’m making or what to make bringing me joy?
Because in a world of content avalanches burying the audience in creator after creator after creator regurgitating news they read earlier that day, all talking about the same thing but from a different human voicebox, you have to actively decide to not be a part of that noise and bring something to the table that will contribute something valuable. And you need to find joy in it or else it will eventually start to eat away at you.
For example with my movie reviews on tiktok, I’m in no way trying to be a critic. I don’t have the knowledge or the authority to pass judgements on a film’s quality from a technical level, but more importantly I don’t find any joy in that. What I focus my reviews on are what value the film brought me. Did it make me relax, or laugh, did it spark any deep thoughts and if so how can I work through those in a way that might help others? And how did this film effect me on a personal level?
As far as society supporting artists, well if you haven’t been following the SAG/ AFTRA WGA strike, or haven’t come across any videos about how social media platforms manipulate and use its creators to fuel their greed, I’ll try to sum it up quickly. The world is controlled by the corporations, and they continue to grow in size. Without hardly anyone noticing, all the streaming services got bought up by larger companies, all the studio executives who are making enough to end world hunger with just a percentage of their riches, consistently deny the union workers simple things like scheduled bathroom breaks, fair livable wages, and residuals for their creative works that not only make them hundreds of millions of dollars per project, but also are their creative brain children. Actors are fighting against their bodies being scanned into a system that then OWNS THEM and can put them digitally into any scene any time for the rest of humanity for a measly $150 payday (which is barely a week’s groceries these days.) Tiktok and instagram make tremendous amounts of money off of their creators, and for fractions of pennies paid out to the few who qualify. In all my years on youtube i’ve only ever broken even, and on tiktok I’ve make $1000 in three years with my videos that have brought in millions of views per month.
The unions are fighting back, and many of us are supporting them morally, but what can we do on an individual level to support artists and creatives on a level that we can actually make a difference on? Well for one, interacting with content on a higher level helps a lot. Liking and commenting, following creators, this all helps. Through my follower count I’ve gotten branded deals with companies that pay decently from time to time. Not frequently, but often enough to make a difference once or twice a year.
Joining Patreon for your top creators goes a LONG way. A lot of us have cheap tiers that cost as little as $3/month to join, and this money allows us to grow our business and offer more meaningful content. Not to mention we get to connect on a deeper level with the people who truly want to.
And lastly, I think the simple act of sharing how much what people do means to you goes so much further than you can imagine. Not all of us have the means to contribute financially, but creating in the arts is a vulnerable business, and comes with its mental health strains. Taking the time to send a message saying why what a creator is doing is helpful to you not only brings them a ton of joy that will fuel their creativity, but it will be something they remember and hold onto for a long time to come. This is the truest form of showing support, and arguably the most valuable. What we lack most in the digital age is human connection, and it’s as simple as reaching out and striking up a conversation.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Professionally my goal is to grow as a filmmaker and storyteller so that I can reach a larger audience with my stories that I hope will help people to reflect on life’s hardships and to bring people joy. Creatively, it’s simple. I just want to express myself in a way that helps others.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.patreon.com/HauntingSeason
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hauntingseason/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/hauntingseason
- TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@hauntingseason
Image Credits
Rob Bradford, Valery Durant, Brad Reeb