Matt Josten and Justus Delgado: Numbers don’t matter, the mentality does
At 10 years old, Matthew “Matt” Josten sat down and watched, “Saving Private Ryan” for the first time. Josten was immediately inspired and took to his camera to recreate the movie he just saw.
He gathered up pillows, Nerf guns, chairs, his brother Tim and his Himalayan cat Bella.
Josten fought valiantly in front of the camera and “killed” a German solider, portrayed by Tim, to finally save Bella.
Emulating a movie he loved exuded pure joy from Josten. From that one, five-minute film, Josten never stopped picking up a camera and bringing his ideas to life in videos.
Prior to making videos, Josten began acting at the age of 5, landing roles such as Michael “Goob” Yagoobian in “Meet the Robinsons” and Kirby in “Chicken Little.”
He decided to take a break from acting during his time at West Ranch High School. Within his acting break, he began to see viral success with his comedy videos that he stuck with since age 10.
“What’s cool about creating your own stuff is you can pretty much just pick up a camera and write something and make something whenever you want and I always really wanted to be making things,” said Josten.
Josten’s videos even got the attention of, at the time, Hart High School student Justus Delgado.
Josten, now 25, and Delgado, now 27, met working together at a local country club as bussers.
The two became friends and started shooting sketches together. The duo quickly realized they wanted to take their sketch comedy up a notch and try their hand at pitching television shows.
They attended acting classes at the Santa Clarita School of Performing Arts, Upright Citizens Brigade and Studio 4. While they worked toward becoming better in front of the camera, behind it they began crafting up pitches for television shows.
“We were always really inclined towards creating our own stuff,” said Josten.
To create a 30-minute video pitch, the duo estimated it took them six months, from start to finish.
Even though they were constantly refining their skills and working, they saw no success at their goal.
Some of their friends in the social media world began suggesting that they try their hand at social media.
“We actually didn’t want to do it,” said Delgado.
The two continued their journey in pitching television shows with this hesitant mindset.
Time after time, they faced rejection and hit a stage of burnout.
In a place where most would quit, the duo decided to take all they had learned and put their previous bias aside to try their hand at social media.
“We never thought we would be doing the social media stuff,” said Josten.
Josten and Delgado, more commonly known as Mattandjustus, changed from their 30-minute horizontal pitches into one-minute, vertical comedy sketches. Their passion reawakened on Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook.
Going from a place of writing 30 minutes’ worth of content to, at most, a minute was both easy and difficult. On one hand, they had plenty of jokes and ideas to bring to life, but the editing process for these sketches was tedious.
“Every second should be entertaining,” said Delgado.
“You can tell a story in a minute,” said Josten. “How do we say this in the least amount of words, in the most interesting way?”
Their editing goes as extreme as cutting single words out of a sentence.
This new avenue of creating