Todd Raviotta has finished his first feature, and he’s been sitting on it for almost a year. At this point, he’s used to waiting.
“It took five years to make,” he says, “but I had been thinking about it before I even shot anything for a year and a half, and some of the roots of it go back to when I was a kid.”
Mediated: The 21st Century Lifestyle clocks in at just under an hour and was shot on digital video, mostly in Raviotta’s old bedroom. This isn’t just shoddy location scouting; he actually transformed his apartment into a film set.
Raviotta’s film is about Phillip, a twentysomething who hardly ever leaves his place, where he has built a wall of televisions, each tuned to a different station. He is so adamant in his isolation that he begins to hallucinate, imagining the evening newscaster is talking to him, trying to persuade him to do something newsworthy—no matter how illegal. It’s a brilliant device and skillfully executed. With Mediated, Raviotta draws the viewer into his character’s paranoia and media oversaturation as he fights with himself over whether or not to venture outside his created world.
“What happens when you’re locked away from striving? What happens when you just care about your television, your food, and your sleep?” Raviotta asks. He says it’s a question he has had to deal with himself.
If you’ve ever interacted with Raviotta, though, you might find this hard to believe: he’s one of the busiest people in Richmond. He juggles being on the board of directors for a local production company, teaching at two schools, judging festivals, filming local bands, and helping with his friends’ films and projects—all while finding time to shoot his own movie, usually late at night, when he says he works best.
He came to Richmond in 1996 and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA from the Photography and Film Department in 2001. He began his teaching career almost immediately by building the film and digital video program at the Maggie Walker Governor’s School from the ground up. While in graduate school, he started teaching classes at VCU. He earned his MFA last year and continues to teach at both schools.
“What I didn’t count on was the fact that I would be entrusted with young artists. They have lots of questions, lots of ideas, and I have to manage their ideas and their goals.” He likens teaching to producing and directing and says it helped him come out of his shell in terms of interacting with others. He now tells his students to think of him as a producer, someone who will do everything in his power to help their films get made.
“My verbal skills are better than when I started,” he adds. He feels more comfortable forming relationships with potential exhibitors, delegating tasks to crew members, and sometimes simply telling people “no.”
In addition to teaching, he serves as film liaison to Yellow House, the production company started by his friend Justin Dray, who plays the lead in Mediated. They met their freshman year in a Hitchcock seminar taught by Mike Jones, co-founder of the Richmond Moving Image Co-op, which has put on the James River Film Festival for the last 12 years. (See RVA #2.)
Justin Dray and Stephanie Kelley incorporated Yellow House soon after graduating, and they have since gone on to produce several local theater events, short films, and festivals, including their first feature, Hitiro the Peasant. In May 2004, Raviotta successfully lobbied for Yellow House to take on Project Res, a monthly themed festival into which anyone can enter their film. He first heard of Project Res through a few undergraduate students who originally conceived the program.
“It was a small AFO way of trying to get films to happen,” Todd says, referring to VCU’s freshman Art Foundation program. Under Kevin Gallagher and Joe Carebeo, Yellow House has made the program a success, bringing in over 100 people per show and screening 8 to 10 films a month. The next step, he says, is seeking sponsorship from local businesses so that Project Res can continue to be a free service for filmmakers (and filmgoers).
“It’s been spectacular for the filmmakers because they come in, show a film, and get to talk about it immediately. So it starts that process.” He views it as a stepping stone to getting films ready to be screened at other festivals and seen by audiences outside of Richmond.
Raviotta sees Richmond as a place where a rich film community can be cultivated and perfected so that its product can be exported to the rest of the country. “I could go to New York and become a television editor, work for MTV or VH1 or some channel that’s got reality TV shows shot on miniDV that I’ve got complete experience in, and get paid pretty well to do that,” he says. But he’s not quite ready to turn his back on a city that has already brought him a core group of collaborators and crew. He’s building something here and, having already screened his films in New York and elsewhere to good responses, he’s confident he’s in the right place.
Keeping Richmond’s film and music scenes close is important to Raviotta. He has used music from Richmond natives Lamb of God in his films, and he sees the musician-filmmaker relationship in his students as well. Many of them direct music videos for their friends’ bands or are in bands themselves. For him, this exchange reflects Richmond as a “macro/micro version of the mainstream entertainment industry.”
“When I was in high school, I studied the Haight-Ashbury scene and certainly the Seattle scene of music, and I always hoped that Richmond, where I was, could be that same sort of idea, where you have bands, painters, sculptors, artists, actors making stuff happen. Something can be born from that.”
Recently, he has had the opportunity to direct his first short 35mm film. For him, it’s like starting all over again. It’s a new medium to conquer, and it could open up a lot of doors for both Raviotta and Richmond film. He’s ready for the challenge.
“I want to be a director. I’ve read enough biographies, I’ve watched enough behind-the-scenes, listened to enough commentaries, seen enough, worked on enough to say, ‘Let’s see if I can really cut it.’”
If Raviotta keeps going at this rate, he shouldn’t have too much of a problem.
Story by Teddy Blanks
