Meet Lake Fama | Story artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lake Fama and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lake, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I’m named “Lake” after the lake I grew up on – Lake Michigan, in Chicago. I grew up a very repressed queer kid struggling with distress around identity and gender that I didn’t have the words for yet, and the only place that eased some of the mental health struggles that came with all that was the lakeside. When I began my gender transition in adulthood, my wife suggested the name Lake in recognition for what Lake Michigan meant to me and how it kept me alive. My complicated relationship with where I grew up formed a lot of who I am today – I was raised in a conservative-leaning family and spent my youth feeling like a shell of an existence, waiting to escape my home and figure my identity out and what my own values were. Now as a trans and queer adult artist, I know that unlearning and learning will both forever be a big part of my journey in life, and I hope that the art I make can be the equivalent of my lakeside refuge for other queer people.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’ve worked in the animation industry as a storyboard artist for the past 5 years – I love my work and I’m grateful to work in this industry every day. But in all my years working, I haven’t really had the opportunity to contribute to any shows with stories or characters like me. Contributing aside, I still almost never SEE characters like me and my loved ones in mainstream cartoons.
I think the animation industry and the executives in charge will, unfortunately, continue to be reluctant, cautious, and often straight-up bigoted about making queer-centered media for a while, so in my free time I make my own series. It’s a kind of hybrid storyboard-and-comic webseries called Heart Work, and it’s queer to the core and in ways that mainstream media still doesn’t often do queer stories: I didn’t want to tell any coming out stories or stories about the hardships of being trans and queer. I wanted to make a comedy series with trans and queer characters at the very front and not on the sides, a series that doesn’t need to justify or explain the characters’ identities, and that’s just a completely silly fun time in a fantasy world with lots of romance and absurd interpersonal drama.

Art-wise, I think it’s also an unusual format. I’ve never seen a whole series presented in a storyboard format, at least. These days for storyboard artists in TV, we’re often doing work that’s practically rough animation. I see our boards cut together with sound in an animatic and often think, “well, that was awesome. We could just air that!” And that was part of the idea behind presenting my series as storyboards (but with drawings cleaned up to a level more comparable to comics) – to appreciate storyboarding as its own storytelling art form, rather than a pre-production to a final animation. I don’t think I’m doing anything exceptional, and it’s not a big, well-known series or anything, but it makes my wife laugh and I hope someone out there will get the same kind of joy from it that I do.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Fortunately for everyone, people rarely ask me this question because my recommendations for LA sightseeing are nearly EXCLUSIVELY birding spots. LA has such a great selection of birds. California quail? Only in Cali, baby. Flocks of itty bitty little bushtits? Not on the East Coast. Wrentits, whom I affectionately call “the bad-taxidermy-looking bird”? West Coast only. Not to mention several varieties of hummingbirds, compared to the One kind in the Eastern U.S. (Ruby-Throated). So yeah, if it’s up to me where to take a visitor around town, sorry, tell your friend to cancel any other plans they had while in LA, because they’re looking at birds now.

My humble opinion on the best birding spots:

The Los Angeles River around Frogtown. Great cafes too, like Spoke where you can rent bicycles.

Elysian Park – good hiking and good birds!

Sepulveda Basin – the paths around the river and around the basin itself. My wife and I also like to hit the Woodley Park archery range whenever friends are in town.

Placerita Canyon Nature Center – there’s both great hiking trails on a stream and they have rehabilitated birds in the nature center that are unreleasable and act as education ambassadors.

That One Trail In Brand Park Where People Have Irresponsibly Left Food and Water Out For Birds Behind A Tree – I have to forgive it because I see quails here nearly every time I hike this trail and as a result it is one of the pillars holding up my mental health.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
There are so many people I owe my success to but I have to shoutout to the Animation Guild’s Queer & Trans committee, “Queer TAG” as it’s called in short. If it weren’t for my fellow union members in general, I would be a meek little artist letting myself be steamrolled over at every moment in the workplace, feeling invisible and never progressing in my skills and in life. The QTAG committee created an environment that helped break me out of my shell by giving me a warm and understanding community when I had spent my first few years in the industry feeling like the only one of my kind in my workplaces, and feeling like I had to quiet my voice at work to not rock the boat. But so much of my growth and connection with my coworkers ended up coming from “rocking the boat”, once I had the confidence to do so! It makes a huge difference when you know you have a network of people who see you for your full self, who understand and support you, and who you understand and support too. Even though we’re not all working on the same project, or in the same office or studio – knowing that I can fall back on them no matter where I am always helps me keep taking steps forward.

Website: https://www.lakefama.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lakefama/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakefama/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LakeFama

Other: https://www.heartworkseries.com/