I got laid off from my Netflix job 2 months after moving to LA. Here's how I networked my way into A24 and got my career back on track.

• McKenzie Bugg moved from a small farm town in Maryland to LA after being hired on a Netflix series.
• The show was canceled and all of the artists were laid off, two months after Bugg's arrival.
• She had to rely on her savings and found her next gig by making connections with other artists.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with McKenzie Bugg, a 24-year-old storyboard revisionist based in Los Angeles. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm from a small farm town in Maryland — very small.

My high school graduating class was only 200. I was one of the only artsy kids at my school, so it's really crazy being in LA now, where it seems like everyone has the same interests as me.

I went to art college in Baltimore to be a storyboard artist. After I graduated in 2021, I was a storyboard artist for Adult Swim and Cartoon Network  and worked remotely from my parent's house in Maryland. I was later hired for the same role at Netflix and moved to LA for the job, but things didn't quite go as planned. 

I entered adulthood entirely remote

The pandemic started during my junior year at college. It was the middle of the week, and I went to class and the teacher said we all had to go home and start packing to leave the dorms. My parents picked me up that day, and I finished both my junior and senior years online from an off-campus apartment — then I moved home and started my career in my bedroom. 

It just doesn't feel like much of a life change, to go from finishing college at home, to starting my career at home too — but I went from paying to draw (at school) to getting paid to draw, so I can't really complain.

I got a great job right after graduating

After I graduated, I was looking to move out to LA to get a job in animation, but I ended up getting a job on Adult Swim's "Tuca and Bertie," because the director saw my work online and really liked it. The job was entirely remote, so I was working from my parents' home in Maryland for about a year and a half. It was a contract role, so it ultimately ended — and then my parents were getting ready to move out of state, so I would need to leave there too. 

I was running against the clock trying to find a new apartment before my parents left. I had no idea where I was going to go, because the town we lived in was all houses and no apartments, so there was nothing I could rent.

I started to think I'd have to just move out to a big city with no prospects, but I got lucky: I received a job offer from a production company that was doing a show for Netflix. This one was also a remote job, but I moved to LA anyway in June 2022 and started the job from my apartment at the end of July.

Moving to LA was scary at first 

I moved here alone and found a 400 square foot apartment, and my mom came to help me move in. It was my first time living alone. The move was really intimidating because I'm from such a small town — so being dumped into a big city where there was so much happening was almost overstimulating.

I had a sizable audience on social media, especially with the animation community — so by the time I moved to LA, I would get a lot of messages from people that work in animation saying, "Hey, I would love to meet up and show you around." I got invited to parties and events where I got to meet more people in person. I went from being the only artsy kid in my high school to being part of a whole community of artists.

Sometimes I felt bad if I stayed in at night because there was so much to do. Everyone I knew was always going out and doing something. But I'm an introvert, so I need to stay home and recharge sometimes. 

The news that we were being laid off was really sudden

I was really enjoying my job and my coworkers too. For a little over two months, I was living the dream.

I'm a storyboard revisionist now and I've worked as a storyboard artist previously. The writers give storyboard artists the scripts for the episodes, and they have to draw out everything that the script says to make the sketch for the animators.

The storyboard revisionists clean up the storyboard artist's work, and while we do work under actual directors, in a live action comparison, what we do is similar to what a director and cinematographer would do — we choose how it's going to look, the camera shots, as well as the physical acting. 

One day I logged into work and my whole team got a message from Netflix that our show may be canceled, so they were putting us on hiatus until February — it was the first week of October.

My director told me we should take that message to mean that the show wasn't coming back at all.

So here I was, jobless in LA after only two months of working full-time, with $20,000 of student loan debt to pay. It happened very suddenly — and it's a great example of why a lot of animation artists feel we're viewed by streamers and networks as the bottom of the barrel, and the writers, executives, and producers are at the top — which really sucks because without all of us, there wouldn't be any animated content to put on their services. 

I was scared to tell my parents 

I'm really grateful that I had saved up money when I was previously living and working from my parents' house. I had enough money in case something like this happened and my rent was covered for a couple of months.

When I got the email about being laid off, my first thought was how scared I was to tell my parents. I feel like older generations look down on choosing art careers because they think you'll end up as a "starving artist." My parents were really supportive of me going to art school, but I thought telling them I got laid off after only two months would make it seem like I was a starving artist and I that had failed. 

Luckily, they were very supportive of me and understood that this is just how the industry is. They believed I would find something soon — but that turned out to be harder than I expected.

I started hitting the pavement to find something as quickly as I could

I went to LightBox Expo two weeks after I lost my job. It's a convention for people that work in fields like animation and VFX, and it's a place to meet recruiters and network with people.

I went to all of the tables for animation studios to talk to the recruiters, telling them I'd just gotten laid off from Netflix. They all responded, "Yeah, all of our shows have been canceled. We don't really have anything we can put you on." I felt super discouraged. 

Things weren't looking bleak for too long, though. On November 1st, I got a text message from a friend I'd made on Twitter, who was directing a show at A24. She asked me if I was still available because she needed a storyboard revisionist for her team. I told her I was available, and the next day I was hired on A24's new animated show — their first. I couldn't wait to tell my parents. I was so happy — it wasn't even two months later and I had another great job. 

The show, "#1 Happy Family USA," doesn't have a release date yet because we're in early production, but it's from Ramy Youssef (of Hulu's "Ramy"), and will stream on Prime Video. The series is such a breath of fresh air in the adult animation sphere, and A24 has been such a great place to work.

I have some advice for people who might find themselves in my situation

The very first thing I would recommend for someone who wants to move to a big city to pursue a creative career is to have an emergency fund before you go, which I'm really glad I did. Even if you have a job offer, you just never know what could happen once you get there.

The other thing I would say is to go out and meet people in your community once you get there. Every time I go outside, I meet people that maybe don't work in animation like I do, but they work in something similar and we have common interests. It's not just beneficial for your career to reach out and make friends, but it helps you get to know a new city and enjoy all that it has to offer. 

I thought LA was so big and scary, and I would be here all alone — but I was so happy to realize there's such a nice community of creatives here that really rallies around each other whenever something bad happens to us.

If I ever get laid off again, I'm better prepared

It feels like I've lived so much in the past eight months or so than I had the entire pandemic when I was stuck in my parents' house. Even though I just turned 24 in December, I feel like this is the first year that I feel like a real adult. 

I finally feel at home in LA. My parents are proud that I was able to survive out here. Now that I've gotten another job, they're like "See? It all worked out." 

I probably will get laid off again by some other company at some point. But now that I've been through it once, I feel better about that now. I just love it here, and I'm glad that I found a new job and get to stay.

If you work in Hollywood and would like to share your story, email Eboni Boykin-Patterson at eboykinpatterson@insider.com.