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
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
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