About

Who The Heck Is Mat Nastos?

Mat Nastos is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a flaky crust.  Ok, so he’s nothing quite so fancy.  What he is can be answered like this:  Mat is your average Super Genius who grew up in Hawaii loving comic books, movies and television.  Oh, and video games…and Dungeons and Dragons.  Ok, so he was a complete nerd growing up and nothing much has changed in his 35+ years on this planet.

Now, unlike a lot of nerds, Nastos took his passions and molded them in to a career that has allowed him to avoid any sort of manual labor, giving him the opportunity to remain the delicate flower he is to this day.  Over the course of that career, Mat has drawn comic books, produced for video games and worked on hundreds of films and television episodes as an artist, writer and director.  If you’ve enjoyed a bad science fiction television show or cheesy B-horror movie since the early 1990s, then there is a good chance Nastos has worked on it in some form.  His television work has been seen on shows such as Highlander, MANTIS, Team Nightrider, Space: Above and Beyond, Babylon 5, Farscape and many others.

Because of his work in the various storytelling mediums, Mat has a fanatical love of visual storytelling.  A storytelling guide he wrote for Bob Harras at Marvel in the mid-1990s became the basis for the book “Visual Storytelling” by Tony Caputo and, later being expanded and released as “Storytelling for the Artistically Challenged” by Nastos himself.  That love of visual storytelling has continued to grow and has been the main reason for Nastos’ shift from storyboarding and art direction to writing and directing for both film and television.

As of this writing, Mat Nastos is hard at work on his next release as an independent filmmaker.  Stay tuned for what is coming next.

*A note on how this site supports itself.  A couple of you (well, one person) has asked me how and why I make so much invaluable information available for free to the public and how I pay for the site itself.  Those are actually two separate questions, so let me quickly answer them.

First off, I remember being a beginning filmmaker quite a few years ago (back in the early days of digital filmmaking…the really early, painful days) and I also remember just how freakin tough it was to find practical information on putting a digital film together for a newbie.  There was a lot of high end, very technical talk, but nothing that really helped a filmmaker out when it came to actually making a film.  So, a few years back, I decided to try and help rectify that problem by sharing a lot of my own experience (good and bad) with other filmmakers here on the internet.  Simple as that.

On the question of “how the site supports itself.” Well, to be honest, it really doesn’t.  What I do to try and make enough to pay for web hosting and a couple of bottles of Diet Mt Dew every month is include affiliate links in some of my articles — good and bad.  Any time you see an Amazon link or anything like that, it’s probably an affiliate link, which allows me to earn a few cents here and there on any purchases made through my links.  As I said above, simple as that.