March 06, 2026
Provided Image/Tshay Meade
In her new movie, 'Tell Me When You Get Home,' Tshay Meade explores the themes of loss, grief and connection. Above, a still from the animated film.
As a documentarian, Tshay Meade had only worked on live-action movies during her career before she started her latest production. While writing the screenplay for the fantastical story about life and death, she started envisioning the project differently than anything she's done in the past.
"The day that I submitted it (for a fellowship), I just said, 'This film is animated,'" said Meade, 31. "I just sent it to them without any clue as to what working in animation actually meant."
"Tell Me When You Get Home" follows 15-year-old Honest, who meets the spirit of one of her ancestors during a family party at her home. Throughout the 8-minute film, which will be shown at the South by Southwest film festival on March 14 and 17, she starts to understand her connection to her late mother and her relationship with her uncle, who is her caretaker.
"It's this really heartwarming, tender portrait of a family who is dealing with loss, and I wrote it after losing somebody very suddenly in my life, and coming to terms with how precious and how fragile our relationships are," said Meade, who grew up in New York and now lives in West Philly.
To bring the project to life, Meade said she needed to translate her vision to an animation team, which was something new for her. She would make stick figure drawings of the scenes she wanted, and the team of 10 artists would reinterpret her ideas in their own style. She and the team would then go back and forth for months to perfect the vision, so it was a very collaborative process, Meade said.
"Animation, we make everything from the blank page, so everything has to be made from scratch, which is on one hand, exhilarating, and on the other hand, it's excruciating, because it requires so much time and so much precision," Meade said.
Following SXSW, Meade plans to show "Tell Me When You Get Home" on the festival circuit for the next year. From there, she's planning to make it available online or possibly for streaming. The hope, she said, is to connect audiences over the experience of loss.
In her own encounter with grief, Meade said she realized how interconnected families and loved ones really are and that while loss can be heartbreaking, it can also bring people together. She wants the film to be a document of a young, Black girl experiencing pain but also embracing connections that can help her understand her own sense of self.
"I want to make something beautiful, I want to make something delightful and I want to make something that people can watch and have conversations about hard stuff which might not be possible otherwise," Meade said.
