Today we’d like to introduce you to Peter Raber.
Hi Peter, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
Growing up I was obsessed with scary movies, books, and stories in general. I loved to draw and write about monsters and ghosts. One of my favorite books was “Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark” which my parents had to eventually take away from me because it gave me nightmares. I begged to get it back.
When I was in high school after watching “Wayne’s World” I remembered thinking “these guys have a public access show, is that really a thing?” I looked it up in the yellow pages and sure enough not only could anyone have a show, but the station would teach you how to use all the equipment. The only rule is that you have to put something on the air. So, I cut my teeth in the production world by grabbing my friends and doing an SNL-type sketch comedy show we called “Project Falcon”. Before we graduated, we did two episodes and finished it off with a 47-minute movie event.
From there I went from college – to doing freelance video work on the side while doing data entry – to being a video producer for the kids’ club at a church – to working at a meat factory – to working at an animation studio – to starting an internal video production studio at a call center – to working at an ad agency – to going back to freelance.
While I like working on other people’s content, I’ve consistently been working on my own personal projects along the way. My first project was an interactive children’s storybook app called “Pete’s Robot” from there I self-published 2 physical children’s books – kickstarted a card game – developed a video creation app called “tiny Vlog” – and started a middle-grade book series called “Don’t Be Scared”.
Don’t Be Scared started when I met another writer at a daddy-daughter dance. My daughter Gloria and her best friend Kate “hooked us up”. We spend the whole dance talking about writing and just making things in general. Chris Orza and I became fast friends. He had just finished his middle-grade book trilogy “Mason Omega” which was about a kid who gets superpowers and goes on crazy adventures. A perfect match. I was showing Chris my idea queue (basically a list of projects, story concepts, etc.) and one of them stuck out to him. It was about a boy who gets a vampire hunting kit in the mail which comes with a vampire that you have to slay. From there we decided to write a whole series of books, the first “season” being 10. So far, we have 3 out on Amazon and first drafts for the next 5. We started in 2019.
With all the potential that this project seemed to have, we wanted to think bigger. Chris, I started to develop a pitch package to pitch to studios. Part of that package was to produce a short film to give a little taste of what the series could look like. We had been writing some short stories which were perfect for the short film. We took a few of those stories and wrote a film about 3 boys in a clubhouse telling them to each other. Like a mini horror anthology. It took us 9 months to write and produce “Spaghetti Face”.
Being in Cincinnati and in the production field for 20+ years I knew that if I ever wanted to go for it and finally make a movie it wouldn’t take that much effort to put together an amazing team because of the talent I was surrounded with. Making the movie was such a great experience, it really brought me back to my initial passions but this time to a new level. While I had directed for animation and commercial products, this was the first time in my life I really felt like I could start an IMDB page.
Spaghetti Face will be in the festival circuit until the end of this year and has won some awards and hopefully will pick up along the way. After the success of the short, we decided to go for it and just make a feature film. Currently, we are in pre-production with the aim of shooting the film next summer. The goal from there is to get a distributor and keep publishing books and make more movies and everything else on the list.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There were some struggles for sure in finding my creative stride. I got let go from a job and thought that I would never create for money again. I thought that I would just have a “normal” 9/5 ish job and create things on the side. But I got a job at a meat factory and worked 5 am to 2 pm. I was there for 9 months when I hurt my back. That was what I would call an act of God because that caused me to reach out to an old friend which led me to start at an animation studio where I met an amazing group of artists that helped me get my mojo back.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I kind of do a little bit of everything in the creative world but I really specialize in storytelling. I also like to put together a team of people who are just better at me at that certain thing. For example, I would consider myself a good video editor but when I was working on Spaghetti Face, I wanted to put someone who was better at it than I was. And sure enough, the film is SO much better because Joe Sandfoss worked on it.
I think the thing that sets me apart from others is my unique way of looking at things. Every artist/creator has a unique perspective so I have that going for me. I also am a manic optimist and that keeps me pushing forward even when a project starts to slip backward.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
The creative industry is always shifting and changing and even more so with technology. The most recent trend I see is the use of AI to create images. That’s something we will probably incorporate into our feature film, but really the imagery these programs can spit out can really give you some wild ideas when it comes to the concept art department.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dontbescaredbooks
