My Journey through my Capstone Project
- Spencer Ragona
- May 11
- 9 min read
Hello everyone! My name is Spencer Ragona. I recently graduated from The School of Film and Animation (SOFA) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2026. My capstone was a massive project that was in making since January 2025 and I completed it on the beautiful date of May 1st, 2026.
As part of my capstone, I gave a presentation. Unfortunately, it was not recorded, so I decided I’ll make a blog post that more or less covers the same information I provided in my presentation. I will be making an ASL version of this blog post at some point. Once it is up, I will update this blog post with an ASL link.
Who Am I?
What is now a massive aspect of my identity was cultivated through my journey in RIT. My identity as an advocate. I did a lot of actionable work during my time.
One of the proudest accomplishments I did as an advocate was to lead a successful petition regarding a closure of a dining hall on campus. It has garnered over 750 signatures. I then followed up with the people responsible for that decision, and I have expressed my concerns. While the cafeteria was significantly revamped, it remained open.
As for advocacy pertaining to SOFA, I was a student representative for the program for a semester. During my tenure as a student representative, I have presented to SOFA faculty about Deaf experiences and how it can improve for Deaf students going forward. I also worked with RIT’s Department of Access Services to assist in the creation of the ASL lexicon for SOFA and filmmaking in general.
Filmmaking has a lot of specialized vocabulary, and generally, interpreters are different for each class. For instance, the interpreters in my fourth year class will not magically know what has occurred in my first year. For one of my classes, there were over 40+ interpreters. The concept of ‘camera axis’ does not translate cleanly to ASL, and there could easily be 20 different ways to sign that, especially if the interpreters do not know what that is.
It’s one of the many subtle discrepancies Deaf people experience on a daily basis. Establishing a database for ASL vocabulary related to filmmaking would help to narrow that gap. It would not solve the problem, but one thing I learned is that everything is iterative.
‘Art’vocacy
‘Art’vocacy, art + advocacy, advocacy through art.
I borrowed this term from Gabriel Ponte-Fleary, I hope he doesn’t mind. One of the ways I advocate for myself is through art. I would probably do another blog post on this, because there is so much to say about this. The point is, the two films I chose to work for my capstone project in SOFA definitely reflects my identity as an advocate. Both of the films are pieces of advocacy, just in opposite ways. One is a political activism film set in Venezuela, Me Fui Con Ella, directed by Gabriel “Gabo” Ponte-Fleary. The other film is more centered on things that are going on internally. In this specific case, it is a subtype of OCD. This film Morbid is directed by Vienna Kayser.
I had significant challenges with each of them. I would be covering my journey with each film.
Me Fui Con Ella
A determined teenager defies his mother's orders and prepares to join a protest against the oppressive Venezuelan regime, driven by the desire to secure a better future for his family.
1: I didn’t know much about Venezuela initially.
I tried to absorb as much as I naturally could; I didn’t do in depth research, but I did do several things- both actively and passively- to try to familiarize myself with Venezuela, their culture and politics.
As for active exposure, I kept up to date on what was going on there. Gabo has assigned me some of the films to watch- for instance, Simón by Diego Vicentini. It really helped me understand the brutality that was going on in Venezuela.
As for passively, it was mostly via conversations or social media. Gabo, and a few others, also talked about his experience in Venezuela, sometimes to explain things to me, and sometimes casually. Sometimes I’d come across posts or videos about Venezuela. Those kinds of things do help with my understanding of Venezuela as I’d say it’s more effective to learn about day-to-day life that way, which is what a majority of people experience.
2: It is a trilingual project. I only know two of the three languages.
I do not know Spanish. I am fluent in written English and I am fluent in ASL. I am Deaf, and the film was entirely in spoken Spanish. So…how the hell do I edit this?
Initially, I was given a script that was translated to English. The only real problem is… how do I know which take is the best? How do I know which one? SOFA urged me to insist all raw videos be captioned. Gabo was initially resistant to this. At the time, his confidence in whether I could adequately do this project was low.
We were both Deaf, so it wasn’t exactly like he could caption it well. I tried to find auto captioning software, but the problem is: Me Fui Con Ella- MFCE, for short- is filmed in America, and the majority of the crew are English-speaking. That meant all the directions- ‘cut’, ‘action’, that kind of stuff- were in English. The dialogue was in Spanish.
Auto captioning software, to my surprise, can’t handle multiple languages. It would either generate unusable captions, crash, or just flat out does not do it. Fortunately, we were able to find one- Avid Media Composer’s Ultimate version- had multilingual support for the automatic captions. The software is expensive though. Luckily, I had a student discount.
Once I had the automatic captions up, Gabo, his mother Janet and I sat in the editing room going through all the footage, cleaning up Spanish. For this portion, I did try my best to assist but my contributions were limited. Once everything was captioned properly in Spanish, I made a duplicate file, and had to tediously extract the text from the Spanish caption, input it in Google Translate, and then back into English. Over and over again. (I later found out, months later, that you could have exported a .txt file of those captions and put it in ChatGPT or something to translate it, bruh. Would have saved me 10 hours.) And then we had to review the English captions again, to ensure that everything was translated over properly.
In short, it took over 20 hours. Two full days of being cooped up in a tiny room with Gabo and his mom. I swear I was going insane by the end of the day. It was brutally tedious. But I am glad it was done, because now I have what I needed. Gabo’s confidence in the project skyrocketed because now, I can access the media and edit it accordingly.
3: SOFA required me to use an editing software I didn’t know.
But the problems are far from over. The preliminary pass is done…but… I do have to edit the film. SOFA required that one of the two capstone films is to be edited in Avid Media Composer. The other one being in Premiere Pro.
Avid is a very different software from any I’ve ever used, and it required a significant time wrapping my head around it. It was a struggle to even split the clips. If I wanted to insert a video between clips, it required a significant amount of clicking, in my case, 25+ clicks. A lot of modern amenities from other video editing programs were lacking.
During my fall semester, I met nearly every week, often late at night, with the editing professor to try to understand Avid. Basically, my week would be composed of me spending the day in the editing room with Gabo. Gabo asked me to do several things, and I didn’t know how to do it. I tried to look it up, but sometimes I couldn’t find it. So I’ll then meet with the professor about the stuff Gabo asked me to do.
It’s one of the other reasons Gabo initially had low confidence in me. The more I picked up Avid, the more capable I became. I did run into a roadblock every now and then- and one case was so strange. Not even the editing professor knew how to solve it. But it was a significantly smoother road.
4: Gabo has really really high standards (which, of course, is a good thing, but it is pressure)
Gabo and I had a LOT of creative disagreements. We were still friends and friendly to each other on a personal level, but creative-wise, we clashed constantly. It was a challenge because at the end of the day, this is his film. Gabo has the final say.
It took time for me to develop the creative trust with Gabo, and it took time for him to be able to let go of a certain level of control to let me do my best work. I promised myself from the very start one thing I will maintain with Gabo is full and total transparency (and that was true for the other capstone film too), and to disclose my intentions behind the editing choices or what I want to do.
Initially, he wanted the film to follow the script exactly. While the overall structure of the story is solid, some of the moments could benefit from rearranging or shortening. It’s a little hard to explain in a blog post as the film is visual.
One example to give you an idea; the original sequence was: the son planning a protest with his friends, then him hiding supplies for the protest, and then the mother finding it. I was able to convince Gabo to get rid of the son hiding stuff, and just jump straight from planning to mother finding it.
The more I was able to use Avid competently, the more I was able to assert my voice and opinions. I am incredibly, incredibly proud of myself for accomplishing this film. I did it, considering all the barriers I had to endure.
Morbid
Vienna and Deva Kayser have been living their lives with severe OCD, but not the kind most famously known through the media. Harm OCD and morbid obsessions finally take center stage in this documentary by following their own experiences with OCD, and the kind of struggles that occur throughout their lives.
1: I struggled so much with finding the story.
I think there were a total of ten interviews. Some are good, but don't look good. Others looked good, but the audio was not. I only had up to 15 minutes for the final edit, which… is not a lot of time for several subjects. While each interviewer could be a story on its own, combining it was an extraordinary challenge.
Both Vienna and I did struggle a lot with finding the story. We made so many different versions, and then I decided to try something radical: remove ALL of the subjects except for the twins. It really helped a lot with the focus of the film. It rapidly became the strongest edit we had, and I couldn’t be more proud of it.
2: There were endless technical issues.
While I was editing it, there weren’t any major problems. But when it was time to hand it off to the coloring and sound stage… what we called the morbid tech curse has struck. There were so many weird issues; for instance, videos randomly flipping for no apparent reasons, texts disappearing, even though it’s right there in the timeline. It got so bad to the point where I had to miss two classes because we tried to solve the tech issues. We fortunately got it under control, but it was stressful.
3: I don’t have OCD.
While I did know that OCD wasn’t just cleanliness, and there’s more to it, one thing I didn’t realize was that it had several subtypes, and one of them is called Morbid OCD. When I first heard (or saw) Vienna’s pitch, I immediately was like ‘I must be a part of this film.’ While I did not have OCD, I do have a history of mental health struggles. I was able to share her desire to bring something internal out to be external and legible to others.
The thing is: I do not have OCD.
Similar to my exposure to Venezuela, I did try to absorb as much as I naturally could. I found films depicting OCD, analyzing their editing styles. I also interrogated the director, Vienna, on what OCD was like. I reviewed the interview footage multiple times.
It wasn’t until I had a breakthrough in the spring, around February or so. As part of my mental health struggles, I do experience intrusive thoughts. I have experienced distress from it before, and it can get extreme. Based on my understanding- I might be wrong- is that as with OCD, the intrusive thoughts would pop up, and the brain wouldn’t let it go. The difference is that I can.
That really helped me connect with the film and helped me immensely in shaping the style. I will provide an example of how I edited my intrusive thoughts into the film in my ASL vlog.
Takeaways
1: Don’t be afraid to experiment.
Both films required significant experimentation and I had to think outside of the box.
2: An unexpected $94 fee can happen.
Yes, there is a story behind this.
3: Despite everything, I’m glad I edited in Avid.
Because at least I know how to use it. It really forces you to develop an efficient workflow.
4: How important collaboration and networking is.
I don’t think I would have gotten to this point if it was not for networking.
5: Be assertive; use your voice as an editor.
You have significant power as an editor. Use it for good.