If you’ve watched a music video over the past 20 years, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen a video made by Raging Nation Films. From rock acts such as Fall Out Boy and Mudvayne to hip-hop acts such as Soulja Boy, Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy to pop acts such as Akon, Raging Nation has made videos for some of the biggest artists in the world.
And behind the success of Raging Nation Films is married couple Kim and Dale Resteghini. The Resteghinis have been together for more than 20 years, and in that time, they have built Raging Nation Films from the ground up. And with Dale driving the creative engine and Kim managing the finances, we can learn from their story about how to relentlessly chase down your dream by not only working hard, but working smart.
Both Dale and Kim describe humble beginnings. Kim told me: “We had no mentor. My learning ground was being a young African-American woman coming from a mom who had nine children in [Hoboken, N.J.] And who put herself through nursing school. By hook or by crook, she made it work. And I learned that.”
With respect for hard work and being careful with money, Kim got her start in the music business working at an entertainment accounting firm for 13 years. “I come from a business background and working in business management with groups like U2 and the Spice Girls,” Kim explained. “I basically handled their financial report. So I didn’t know anything — I knew money. I knew finances.”
Dale’s path to Raging Films was by no means linear. He told me, “I wrote my first script when I was locked up. Being adopted and from a working-class family from Massachusetts — my dad was a fireman, construction worker. I was always the black sheep of the family.”
Dale eventually found his calling in arts. “I loved sports and was very artistic, but never really found the thing that I wanted to do. I was a curious kid and I would get into trouble,” Dale explained. “I was looking for adrenaline rushes. I got arrested a lot as a young kid. Never did drugs, never drank, never did anything to people per se. Just always felt conflicted and troubled. Just knocking myself down and picking myself back up. It was just this thing I did to myself.”
But this experience proved crucial for Dale. “Eventually, in the early ‘90s, the last time I got in trouble, I was looking at four to five years [in prison] and fortunately only got six months. I wound up in a bad relationship, breaking some laws. So I wrote that experience into my first script,” he said.
They initially met like many couples do. Kim recalls, “I was working on Central Park West, and one day I saw this cute young guy on roller blades, and he happened to say, ‘Hello,’ and it started from there.”
But Kim noticed something different about Dale and was intrigued by his professional vision. “When I met him, he didn’t have a dime in his pocket. But he had a belief. He had a passion. I could see that when he spoke about the things he wanted to do in the entertainment industry, how he wanted to be an actor and a director. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I’d never met someone who was so passionate and so steadfast in his beliefs and what he wanted to do.”
And Dale’s vision was to tell stories like many of his influences. “I’m one of the last in camera-action guys. I always want my videos to be as epic as they can be, because I feel like the audience wants to see more than just a band playing. I tend to want my videos to be cinematic vignettes.” Dale explained. “Tony Scott is somebody who made amazing films who massively influenced me. Nigel Dick — he was to me the Michael Bay of music-video directors. He would take everything that was a radio rock song and turn it into a mini-film.”
Dale also counts Sam Bayer, Dean Karr and Martin Ahlgren as his influences.
For Dale, one of the keys to his creative process is having a direction for the video based on the meaning of the song, but being willing to improvise as needed. “Everything’s not storyboarded. I didn’t go to film school. I keep everything in my head,” Dale said. “We all know what the treatment is, what the story is, but I don’t give them a shot-by-shot take. I have general direction. But if the sun on a given day is right here, right now, then those are the moments people like.”
Dale was told that this approach was more akin to painting. “It was an epiphany, because that’s exactly what it feels like when I’m directing. It feels like the camera is my brush, and the environment is my canvas. So when I’m directing, it feels like I am painting with my camera,” he said.
But for Kim, Dale’s creativity was not enough for her to join him in business. She needed to know that he would be committed — that he had grit.
Grit can be defined as the tenacity and resolve needed to put in the hard work to achieve goals. One initial study found that even though grit was unrelated to IQ, grit predicted grade-point average in Ivy League undergraduates and retention in West Point cadets. As people who have the drive to achieve goals may be happier with their lives, grit has also been shown to be an independent predictor of life satisfaction.
Kim soon decided that Dale had the grit necessary to be successful in business. “And I said to him, ‘I’m on board for this journey as long as you’re committed. So when we started out, we didn’t have the college education, but I knew he was passionate about what he wanted to do, and that was enough for me,” Kim said. “Because I saw that every day, we would get up and go to CSC Camera House. He would pick out his equipment, and maybe I would drive the 14-foot truck that day, and he would unload all of the equipment. And I would get out of work and help him. And we’d shoot in our apartment. So it was really grass roots. Really starting from the bottom.”
But Kim also knew that even with creativity and drive, a business would not work unless the finances were handled properly. Kim explained, “Maybe it was because I was on the inside, and I saw the pitfalls of most artists. I met so many artists that on paper, you would think that they are beyond wealthy. And at the end of the day, they didn’t have a dollar for a donut.”
Part of the issue was letting other people manage finances. “Leaving it to their business managers and their lawyers to handle all payment. And I’ve seen it – from ordering their groceries to paying for a party,” she said. Kim explained that this system inevitably leads to waste. “And I saw so many things in the industry from artists that was just wasteful. Spending $800,000 on flowers, and you didn’t even bring in that much that year. Spending $1 million on a gold chain, and you’re a new artist. Not signing their own checks,” she said.
“It’s like privileged spending.”
But Kim knew that while Dale had creativity, she had the financial know-how to run a business. “The good thing about Dale and I is that we balance each other. He’s makes creative art, but I make efficient art,” Kim explained. “He has the visions of the videos, he comes up with the ideas. I’m always amazed. Even after 20 years, I’m still in awe about how he comes up with these ideas. But I know finance. I know money. I can handle money. Because that’s what I’ve been doing for so many years.”
And having seen the demise of other artists who spent their money foolishly, Kim made sure they managed their money wisely. “That’s one thing I didn’t want to do with us, because I knew we were a start-up. And I knew that most start-ups don’t make it within the first five years. We never lived like that. We didn’t treat the business like that. We respected the business. But also we respected the money we had to put into the business. And it wasn’t a lot, but we made it work.”
And with creativity and efficiency, Kim and Dale got started on their dream.
They began with making the film that Dale had worked on while he was in prison —“Colorz of Rage.”
“We spent two years trying to get ‘Colorz of Rage’ funded. And we couldn’t get it funded, so we eventually made it ourselves. I still worked a full-time job,” Kim said.
Kim explained that this was no easy task. “When we financed ‘Colorz of Rage,’ the first film, it was using my paycheck and money from the extra jobs that he did — background extra work. We would take that, and we’d take a percentage and apply it towards the bill. It was very difficult,” she said.
But that determination and effort created opportunities. “That paved the way for us to do another film that had Eminem in it and some other rappers,” Dale said. “That paved the way for me to be able to shoot a tour called ‘‘Tattoo the Earth’’ in 2000, which lead me into music videos. And in 2000, I met a good friend like Jaime Jasta from a band called Hatebreed, Lajon (Witherspoon) from Sevendust, and all these big bands like Slipknot.”
And what Kim and Dale found was that because many music-video budgets were limited, their combination of creativity and efficiency was not only good business in a general sense, but also absolutely necessary in an industry that continued to demand more for less money.
And Dale explained how his more flexible and spontaneous style fit with the constant budget shifts that would occur in music videos. “Unless you’re on a multi-million dollar commercial, where you can make everything exactly the way you want it to happen, 99 percent of the time, it never happens that way anyway,” he said. “But the core of everything I do is always making sure that the artist, whether they sell 10,000 records or 10 million records, the artist has something that visually represents them well.”
So Dale and Kim improvised. Dale said, “I’m never the ‘no’ guy. There’s a solution to every problem. You never end a dilemma or the conversation with just the word, ‘no.’”
Part of this was taking extra time to find the best, cheapest location. “When I started doing videos for rock and metal bands, those budgets in early 2000 weren’t very big. And for me, the biggest thing was always the location,” Dale said. “I was always driving, and I would see some abandoned warehouse off in the distance. These broken down industrial places that still had an ‘epic-ness’ to it — a post-apocalyptic feel. It’s location and vibe for a lot of those videos.
”And Kim was always next to me, saying, ‘Pay attention to the road, you’re going to crash.’”
Above all, they relied on a tireless work ethic. “We were 100 percent committed. We were blinded by making it happen,” said Kim.
Dale explained, “I had to literally bang on doors. There was barely email. So you had to make phone calls. And maybe you’d get through or maybe you’d get hung up on. Just leave hundreds of messages and maybe get a call back or maybe never. And then I was literally knocking on every door from New York to L.A. to Atlanta. That was my hustle.”
Dale’s relentless and spontaneous approach both on and off screen earned him the nickname “Rage.” “I’m not one of those directors who sits in his chair and is in a relaxed state of mind. I’m very passionate, and I like to be in the moment. And my videos come from those very intense moments when I’m on set, and I’m into the performance. And I’m very animated when it’s getting done. I was naturally screaming so that just became an insider’s nickname. Because my company was called Raging Nation Films. So people would just interpret ‘Rage.’”
Dale explained how the name ‘Rage’ eventually became a brand. “After doing a lot of hardcore and metal, I started doing a lot of rap and hip-hop. So there was this one guy, whose name was ‘Smurf,’ who was managing Soulja Boy. When I did a video called “Crank Dat,” Smurf was, like, ‘Listen, your boy D told me people call you Rage.’ I think we should call you ‘Rage’ in this video, not Dale Resteghini.”
“And prior to this I would go to certain events and meet up with people, and they would say, ‘What video did you do? Why are you here?’ And they would say, ‘What’s your name again?’ And I would say Dale Resteghini… it didn’t work. So when Smurf suggested I say ‘Rage’ and go to the next level of my career, that one-word name worked wonders from a branding standpoint.”
And so two decades later, Kim and Dale are raging as strong as ever. Kim explained, “Twenty years later, Raging Nation Films is a brand. We’re a brand. And it was basically done by two people with humble beginnings. It’s doable. It really is doable.”
And the world is taking notice. “We had companies coming to us, asking us, ‘How did you guys do it?’ When the industry fell apart in 2008, all of these big production companies were calling us,” Kim said. “We did 70 music videos in one year, sometimes on these miniscule budgets. I knew that if Dale was out there being creative that I would be able to cut corners. Not cutting corners where his art suffers.”
And Dale and Kim are paying it forward. Dale has advice for aspiring directors: “When you ask, ‘What should they be doing?’ The answer is, ‘What should they not be doing?’ They should be doing everything. It’s not just one thing. You just can’t make a short film or a video for your local rapper. The answer isn’t, go make something, send it to somebody and see what they say. Because every studio, every label, every video commissioner, every band — they’re oversaturated with great directors.”
Dale explains that he makes referrals based in part on being able to do the same thing that he and Kim have done for years — make good art for less money. “I’ve mentored about 20 or so directors over the last 12-13 years. I pass off a lot of videos, so I have to look to see who’s got the look, who’s got the passion, who’s got the brain capacity to handle production,” he explained. “Because even if budgets come down, the labels still want what they want. So identifying the right people that are good, that have their own gear, that know how to handle pressure, handle timelines.”
But ultimately, Dale knows that it comes down to those same intangibles, “I tell everybody they have to have thick skin, passion, relentlessness, you’ve got to be willing to not sleep. You have to be willing to go farther and longer than the next person.
”Everybody likes the idea of being a director or calling themselves a director. And I know a lot of talented people that are great and could be great,” Dale explained. “If you’re not willing to work as hard as that person who doesn’t have the same kind of gear you do, or as good of an eye, and that other person is going and meeting bands and hustling, showing their reel — they’re the ones who are going to get the work. The really talented person who’s sitting in their room waiting for the work, waiting to be discovered by the world? It’s not going to happen.”
And Kim hopes that aspiring artists recognize that being smart financially is an important part of the creative success. “Sign your own checks. Be responsible for your own money. I think you should always control your books,” said Kim. “And if you can’t do that, have a family member — somebody who knows basic finance, who knows how to spend every dollar, who knows how to control the budget. You have to be in control from the beginning of what you’re bringing in and how you can distribute that to make it work.”
Dale and Kim are looking forward to more raging. Kim said, “We’ve been able to stand the test of time in this business. Most of the people we know divorce. They’re on their second or third marriage, or they’ve just given up. What has kept us strong is that, No. 1, we like each other. That’s it. You have to like the person that you work with. And I know that sounds kind of corny or hokey, but we liked each other from Day One.”
And Dale is thankful for his partnership with Kim. “Kim was the quiet force and protector, so to speak, who saw a talent and a passion in me which most did not,” he said. This was before we even knew I was going to evolve into a writer and director. I believe it was her genuine and honest belief in me which allowed me in her life on the personal level which gave birth to the creative professional I’ve become.”
And they hope others find the same success. As Kim said, “We just make it happen. Is it difficult? Yes. But it can be done.”
