Complaint Review: Raven Low Clouds - Nationwide

Raven Low Clouds, or as he was previously known, Ravento Espinoza, is a scammer. He's not an evil guy and never stole money from us (though there are other people on this site with their own reports who claim he did), but he'll use you for free work and never pay and take advantage of your kindness. Here's the full story:

I was asked to come on as a preproduction PA for a film that Raven was producing called Proletariat. One of his actors connected me to the film. He promised me $250 a day (man did that sound great). We worked out of the Banana Bungalow hostel in Hollywood for the first few days, as he said that the studio we would be working with didn't have their offices set up for us yet. We kept "working", which was essentially us (Raven, me, and another PA he had worked with for several months prior) doing busy work and doing photo shoots with the actors for "promo photos". 

He would leave randomly and go to other cities to speak to his "lawyers", we have no idea where he really went -- he said he had funding for the film, kept making calls and saying some BS about how he was speaking to investors... Anyway. One day about a week after I started, he said that one of the actors had accidentally leaked the script, and the investors found out. The bottom line is that this did NOT happen and Raven completely lied about the incident to explain what happened next. He said that the investors were either dropping their funding if he kept the actor on the film, or they would stay on if he fired them. He said that he wanted to keep the actor so badly that he'd rather drop their funding -- $500,000. What??? What idiot would do that? 

Anyway -- we figured out he had never gotten funding in the first place, it was all a cover up. I called the production company he claimed we would be working with, they said that that was absolutely not happening and that I was misinformed. Raven also said that instead of the investors, we would be using a film funds completion company to finish the film instead once we had 40% of it shot. Wouldn't you know it -- the owner of the production company was ALSO the owner of the funds completion company (found out from their website) and he said that his film completion company also had no intention of working with Raven and that he lied to us. Raven lies to the people working closest with him to use them as pawns as he tries to BS the big fish above us like "investors" and production companies. He'll lie to his dying day because he could never get anything done on his own! And he likes to have people around to do his bidding to make himself feel important!

Of course I never got a paycheck for the time I worked! Raven drifted off and we haven't heard from him for over a month. He had me and five other people doing photoshoots with him, I created a budget for a portion of the shoot, we drove him all around town (stupid on our parts to not realize sooner, admittedly). 

In short -- Raven will give you the runaround to make his films or stupid projects get as far as they can go before his baseless plans totally burn out. He lies to everyone and has no intentions of paying you, he's not honest and doesn't care how much he screws you over. He'll do the thing where he tells person A that person B is on the project, so person A joins in. THen he tells person B that person A is on the project, and asks person B to join in, so they do. He'll do this with as much bullshit as he can until one of the lines falls through (like a professional production company realizing that this guy is a hack, so he has to explain why the production company that was "so supportive of us" is no longer on the project...and acts like we're the ones firing them because they wont update the budget! such BS...)

The other PA said she has been working with him for six months and hadn't gotten paid since January. I was with her at lunch as text after text of his rolled in to her phone with lengthy explanations as to why her money hadn't hitten her bank account yet, as if the direct deposit was screwing up, or OH the bank always deposits it at a certain time, or OH it takes a few days to go through or OH time zone differences...So hilarious because of course the money never came, he just comes up with crazy excuses until its past the point of no return and someone ends up just screaming at him. Weird part is he never acts like he's guilty, I really think he's delusional or brain damaged. He seems like a nice enough guy, seems to have no ego, and yet acts in this crazy way that no normal person would act in or lead people on by. 

He'll say he's worked with the Simpsons guy and on some Michael Bay project, he acts like he has big connections -- he has NOTHING. He's bankrupt. He's a liar. Don't work with him, obviously. Hope this helped!