MeeMee Costa and her Apple Mage

Apple Mage Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheAppleMage

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/bunhearts

Instagram.com/bunhearts

meemeecosta.com

She is looking for work: https://twitter.com/bunhearts/status/1399520665577742345

Her interview for SCAD Storyboarding Club can be found here, of which I've taken some of the information from: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LvpVh09Xl_I7mfBQtA08H7I3b5MkmhBT

Kameelah (MeeMee) Costa is an amazing black artist in Burbank who is preparing to launch her webcomic The Apple Mage on Tapas/Webtoon today.

Personal Work

Her most prominent personal work has been The Apple Mage series, created in August 2019. In a world where magical humanoid apples coexist with humans, an 18 year old magic student apple named Red goes on a quest to find her missing grandmother, Granny Smith. Among the characters that tag along on her journey, are Reggie, her familiar currently stuck in a tiny worm form, Crabapple, a jaded diner food service worker, who quits her sucky job (Channeling Costa's own past sucky experience as a barista in Starbucks), in favor of finally getting to go on an adventure herself, and Jonagold, a child with a similar goal of locating his missing mother. You can watch an example animatic MeeMee made of the scene where Red meets Crabapple at https://vimeo.com/443151566

Red

Granny Smith

Crabapple

Jonagold

All drawings taken from https://twitter.com/TheAppleMage

Her second most important project is Bound, which is about people who are bound to books they're born with and the quest to break free from their fate. Two more of her concepts will take place within the same shared universe set in purgatory with demons. One deals with the long rivalry of competing music shops and the other deals with a new mailwoman who is the reincarnation of Hermes forced to deliver people's last wishes along with their mail.

She is perfectly content with making comics of her ideas and not pitching them to the networks. She is afraid of corporate compromises ruining her series, and the prospect of becoming a showrunner is too daunting for her to want to achieve.

Her Life

MeeMee was born in Sacramento, but her family moved to Florida when she was five, and later to Georgia where she spent most of her life in before moving to Burbank California in October of 2020 to start her career in the Los Angeles animation industry. She married her husband Adam (@foopdraws on Twitter) in December of that year, after 2 years of being in a relationship together.

Inspiration:

Meemee is inspired by nature in her personal work, seeing how she can push it with creating fun plant characters. Listening to music has inspired her as she channels the songs into her drawings as she listens to them, to help warm up her brain to draw. She likes many artists, but their influence funnels into one small channel, instead of being one solid inspiration for her.

Her sucky SCAD experience

Meemee transferred from the College of Coastal Georgia to SCAD in the Winter of 2019.  At SCAD, she felt that it was ultimately a time waster. She wasn't taught anything important and wished that she would have finished at the community college instead as she felt that her level of skills would have been the same or better. She dropped out of SCAD altogether for the 2020-21 year when she got her first Storyboard Revisions job with Tig N' Seek to avoid having to take on the heavy workload of school work and industry work. Her debt was ultimately softened by several scholarships she received, of which the debt stood at about 14k dollars.

The school lacked the knowledge of the animation industry, leading her to encounter more obstacles.  She was unaware of storyboarding as a job, so she went into SCAD in Animation at first.  She took a traditional animation class and hated animating, which is what led her to take the newly created storyboarding pathway. Even then, she had to learn Storyboard Pro on her own time, and she made her networking on Twitter instead of at school. The only bright side of SCAD were the friends she made while there. Overall, she advises new beginning animators to stay away from art schools in general, to not go through what she did.

Her sucky Starbucks experience

At around the same time, MeeMee took on a Barista job at Starbucks in October of 2018. Almost immediately, she and her coworkers were being constantly berated by rude customers for the duration of her time there, lashing out at them for every little mistake they made. When the mean customers would leave them, the baristas would go into the back of the store and cry until they would be required to keep working. The job did not make enough money to be fully sustainable either, so she opened up freelance art commissions in Summer 2019.  Eventually however, she had enough of the verbal abuse and the minimal $9.70 pay an hour to go along with it. She quit her job in February 2020, which was the best decision she made at Starbucks. Her terrible experiences would eventually seep into her personal work such as the character of Crabapple in the Apple Mage.

First Industry Job at Cartoon Network

She broke into the industry in August of last year when she got a Storyboard Revisionist job at Tig N' Seek at Cartoon Network Studios after being accepted on her very first industry storyboard test, which came as a big shock to her. CN was open to remote work at that moment as long as she could eventually relocate, which was the deciding factor to take her in. Her first day was on August 31, and finished her role on the series on June 11, this year. In mid-October, she made the move from Georgia to California, thinking that she could work in the studio in a few months time.  But CN never reopened, so it was solely WFH for her.

On Tig N Seek, she was paired up with another board revisionist on the same episodes, and they get their own different sections that they need to revise. Her process of revising: if there's any notes on the board to fix, she has to address the notes. When she gets a thumbnail sketch, she'll check to see if there needs to be more posing or acting to go along with it, listening to the dialogue audio and seeing if the board scene is not articulating properly with what the character says. She usually goes straight from an original thumbnail sketch to working on a cleaned-up drawing of it in order to get the character's proportions right. If she gets stuck on figuring out the new posing, she'll act out the actions physically and see how someone would naturally say or do the action according to the given script or audio to see what would translate from her performance and be put in the board. Compared to Starbucks, it's fun and rewarding work to do.

But due to WFH, her work and life balance was not stable. Her motivation to get work done was severed by the fact that her office was in the room right next to her bed inside her confining apartment space  She missed the community aspects of socializing with her friends and peers that she felt in organized working environments such as in the computer lab of SCAD and in libraries.  Keep in mind that these issues are not the fault of the crew at Tig n Seek at all, or is a true reflection of MeeMee's weaknesses at work, more just part of the unfortunate circumstances that have forced WFH on artists that thrive doing work in a studio, even if they're an introvert otherwise.

 She is currently looking for work right now, and she's made an animatic to prove it: https://vimeo.com/557916491

Housebroken Animation Review ("Who's Wild?", 1BBHB04)

Some standout and interesting animation in this week's new episode of Housebroken, so let's take a look.

Episode 3/4 (Airdate order/production order respectively)

"Who's Wild"

Supervising Director: Mark Kirkland
Episode Direction: Jake Hollander
Retake Director: Corey Barnes

Consulting Director: Angelo Hatgistavrou

Supervising Animator: Gerardo Fuentes Jr.

Outsourcing Animation Studio: Synergy Animation (Shanghai, China)

In-House Retake Animators: Jun Baik, Ben Brownstein, Avery Depraect, Venetia Ellis, Matthew Incontri, Russell Jamison, Jose Juarez, Chris Stange

Now, Housebroken is one of these American adult animation series that relies on a samey formula for its visuals. The character designs and the animation aren't great (Very watered down designs by the Fox network, coming from legendary Simpsons director Mark Kirkland). It's a typical series that is run by writers who do not have much, if any, animation experience at all, and it shows. (Got the impression from reading all those Housebroken interviews from the showrunners).

But still, this doesn't mean that the artists can't do good stuff in the series. There's quite a good amount of solid animation moments in this episode. Most of which I suspect comes from the above-mentioned nine in-house retake animators, which is a very large number for what is otherwise an outsourced to Asia series. I think I can tell some of the time when in-house is animating a scene. Sometimes, it just switches in the middle of one shot from overseas to in-house, and other times, in-house tackles to animate the full entire shot. Bento's animators seem to mostly be working under a puppet system for their animation, while Synergy is working with hand-drawn animation. I don't work in animation myself, so don't take anything I speculate as absolute fact.

This shot of Elsa at the cold open of the episode is a very good example of a switch midscene.

Specifically, the switch happens at "Living up to my uniform", with Elsa stomping her little legs. There is a noticeable pop in Elsa's face drawing right before it happens.

Look at Elsa's face as it switches to a new drawing of her face even as her face doesn't even move in this part of the scene. And the new drawing of her face stays for the remainder of this scene. It's also at this point that the animation switches from being hand-drawn with an on-ones movement (Which is the norm for outsourced 2D Asian studios) to being puppeted from a rig timed on-twos as she starts patting her feet on the couch, which to me indicates that either the episode director or the retake director wanted a little more acting touches to this scene to sell Elsa's performance more. So the feet stomping was added in in retakes most likely.

Most of Honey's animation in the cold open also looks like retake animation as she's animated with puppet rigs such as this string of shots.

This series of shots is strongly animated. It does a good job of establishing that Honey is bored out of her mind and wants to hear about something new for a change.

First off, we get some good tongue action as Honey yawns. It's always a good thing to incorporate more animal-specific animation, such as the dog's tongue stretching out when the dog is yawning.

I like it whenever Honey's flappy ears have some nice subtle follow-through animation such as in these scenes. But it can be rather hit or miss throughout an episode whether or not her ears will have follow-thru animation in a shot, and the shots that don't feel more cheaper in my eyes.

The next shot is really good. Honey blinks her eyes very slowly, adding to a sort of groggy feeling of her becoming more tired from the boring speech.

To add to that, Honey lightly scratches her arm in the same slow manner, which is another nice addition to show that she's bored.

Her growing restlessness is quite well portrayed at the last shot with this bouncy nervous laughter animation.

The most striking portions of the episodes so far has been Honey's fantasy sequence of the rare coyote that she fawns over. This finally gives some room for animation as a medium to be taken advantage of in this series to great effect. Such as this sequence where Jake Hollander crafted this great scene where it is set in black night-time silhouette, and the canine body odor is a striking pink color that invites Honey to come over to the coyote.

Some daring shapeshifting effects too. I would love this series if it only was in the style of these fantasy sequences, but Fox wouldn't be happy about that.

The first bit of animation of the racoon looks like in-house animation also just from how snappy it is timed out. The racoon throwing the broom and the clippers has some good force and weight to the movement as as well, which you can't really say about the overseas animation. We've also got some good animation of the racoon's ears moving up and down depending on his expression, a nice animalistic detail.

The racoon is a fun one-shot character in his acting. This is a fun shot where the raccoon acts all territorial peranoid about definding his lot of garbage and he dives into the trash can and flips right back up. All fun stuff by this series's standards.

Next shot has some more fun acting as the racoon takes a step back in a frightened, and snappy fashion. His head shakes really subtly after he takes the step back, adding to how anxious he is about his space. Another nice detail I notice is the racoon's left arm twitching too, which really makes for a fun animal-listic behavior.

This Honey shot looks like a fully in-house shot to me because of the completely puppeted animation of her. Also note the great follow-thru movement of her ears.

This shot, the raccoon rejects Honey's offer so he tries to scare her off.

His fur frizzles when he tries to be threatening. 

The racoon makes a quick scuttle towards her.

And tries to scare her off again, furiously wiggling his tail upright to appear as a threat. Generally, the better parts of Housebroken's animation are almost always the scenes with the realistic animal behavior other than the more samey dime a dozen adult cartoon on-model acting scenes.