We recently connected with Hannah Keiffert and have shared our conversation below.

Hannah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

Oh…everything? Haha I mean, it’s a shame that art has to be tied to business at all, but I get that that’s how the world works. To get more specific, I could go on and on about the strikes, use of AI, underpaid/undervalued employees, etc. but what I’ll settle on, plain and simple, is this: the creative never comes first, and it should 100% of the time. Companies follow trends and look at data, but they don’t really value original ideas. They don’t take risks. They would much rather hire a guy who’s made five shows to run their 32082058th spinoff of some IP they’ve been driving into the ground than a fresh face who has a unique perspective. And I get it. If you’re going to be sinking X amount of dollars into something, you want some guarantee that it’ll work out in your favor. But I think companies quickly lose sight of why we watch TV shows and movies in the first place. We want to feel something special…connect to an experience we can’t get in our day to day lives. We want to laugh, cry, think, learn, be challenged. Maybe feel something we’ve never felt before. And that can’t happen without creativity coming first.

Hannah, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Hannah Keiffert and I’m a writer/producer based in Los Angeles. I got my start in the arts in college, majoring in digital media and then transferring to pursue a photography degree—oddly enough. But during my senior year, I had sort of a career crisis. I realized the reason I liked photography was not because I wanted to be a photographer…but because photography was an outlet for me to tell visual stories. I started to think about what else I was passionate about…and kept coming back to animated television—something very important to me during my childhood and adulthood. So for my senior thesis, I combined my two passions and created a stop motion animated short. And from then on, everything changed! I decided to move to LA to pursue a career in the entertainment industry—animation, specifically. I wasn’t sure what exact role I was looking for, or path I would follow, I just knew I wanted to create visual stories and share them with the world.

My first major job was creating, writing, and producing “Liv in the Future” (@livinthefuture) on Instagram—a first-person narrative that follows a teenage girl named Liv who posts “photos” (illustrations by Mika Tanagi) of her new and weird life in the dystopian world of the year 3000. This was such a fun, unique, and rewarding experience. I mean, how does one tell a fully fleshed out story with only posts, captions, and interactions with fans? But I realized the process wasn’t too dissimilar from photography—I was just telling a story through still images. Through the same company, I then got to write and produce stories for a visual literary app—something akin to Webtoon, just more lit-based rather than comic-based. This was also a unique storytelling exercise: tap-based short sentences, only 1,000 words per chapter, and helping craft imagery (backgrounds, avatars, PNGs), that helped best illustrate and punctuate the story. I got to flesh out Liv’s story a bit more through this medium, and got to create two new stories: an angsty fantasy drama and an LGBT high school rom-com.

I then decided I wanted to try out a more traditional format and move into TV—the thing that brought me to LA in the first place. I moved to Warner Bros Animation and joined the production crew for “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai”, where I learned all the ins and outs of an animated TV production pipeline. I then wanted to try my hand at the more creative side of things, so I became a script coordinator and freelance writer on “Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Pups”. Now, unfortunately, the industry is a little crazy, but I’ve since been keeping busy with a bunch of freelance and personal projects—writing for an indie video game, pitching graphic novels, working on script samples. I love all the different and unique writing opportunities that come with illustrated/animated media. And I love producing those same ideas and helping them become fully fleshed out projects!

My dream is to keep creating and producing more unique projects, especially ones that speak to demographics that are often sidelined (for example, female queer animation nerds, like myself!). I think it’s so important to create media that people can feel “found” in. In my life, I’ve often felt lost, like a misfit…but when watching certain animated TV shows, I felt found. Seen. And I want to be able to share that experience with everyone else.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think people don’t really understand exactly why I have a preference for animated media when I’m not a traditional artist myself. Not that most animation writers/producers are necessarily artists, but it would make more logical sense for me to want to pursue live action coming from a photography background. And I’d still love to be involved in a live action project someday. But there’s something about animated media that I just connect to in a way that I never have before with live action. You’d think that it would be easier for me to relate to a real live millennial-aged actress than an animated teen boy with ghost powers (Nickelodeon please let me pitch a reboot!!!), but it’s not. To me, animation already pushes creativity more right out the gate—you’re creating something from nothing…so you’re already removed from a plane of reality. I think that that fosters an experience where you’re more in your own head, both when you’re creating it and watching it. Animation is for people that think outside the box—”misfits”, so to speak. I think that’s why so many animated stories are ABOUT misfits—because they’re created by misfits, and as a result, consumed by them. And I certainly felt like a misfit my whole life. I think if you’re a “non-creative”, you’re also…less likely to be a misfit. And that’s fine. More power to you, honestly. But I think that’s why sometimes there’s a bit of a disconnect where some people don’t really understand why I’m so passionate about this.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Being a creative can be so painful, haha. I could say that it’s nice we constantly have an outlet to express ourselves, and while that’s true, for me it’s not the most “rewarding” aspect. Plain and simple? The most rewarding thing for me is having a finished product. Working towards a goal and then achieving that goal. Like, I think back on doing my stop motion senior thesis, and while it was fun, it was also such a long and painful process (just being real). But then I finished it. And I could point to that thing and be like…”I made that.” And now, it’s something that other people can experience, too. Possibly relate to. Maybe even feel “found” in. And that’s pretty darn cool.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hannahkeiffert/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahkeiffert/
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/livinthefuture/ https://vimeo.com/290542647

Image Credits
Liv in the Future and Death’s Shadow art by Mika Tanagi. Total Drama Club art by Maghfira Ramadhanti. Super Chef Ultra art by Erin Kim.