NYWIFT Blog

By Camille Felipe

Welcome to NYWIFT, Melody Tally!

Melody is a multi-hyphenate artist, award-winning actress, screenwriter, filmmaker, and engineer. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University and her Masters in Business Administration at Trinity Washington University.

She studied acting and directing with Vera Katz and Haile Gerima at Howard University and can be seen on Tubi, Netflix, and Amazon Prime in acclaimed films including Residue and Silent Brave.

Melody spoke to us about balancing her creative and technical skills, how her engineering background influences her artistic projects, and her exciting upcoming ventures, including a math book and limited series.

NYWIFT Member Melody Tally.

Welcome to NYWIFT! Please introduce yourself briefly to our readers!

Thank you for such a warm welcome. I am Melody Tally, and I am an award-winning actress, screenwriter, artist, and mechanical engineer. I have been building my career since 2009. I can be seen on Tubi, in Troop 491: The Adventures of the Muddy Lions; on Netflix in the Merawi Gerima-directed, critically-acclaimed feature, Residue, distributed by ARRAY and Ava DuVernay; and on Amazon Prime in the award-winning film Silent Brave, written, directed, and produced by EmmyAward-winning director Jami Ramberan.

I’ve written three feature films, two episodic series and multiple shorts, and try to find inspiration daily.

What brings you to NYWIFT?

I’m here for both business and pleasure. I’m here to meet, greet and make friends with other ambitious, powerful women, and collaborate and create together. I’m here to meet women who know how to do things that I don’t and, by leveraging their expertise, experience and knowledge, we [can] collaborate and achieve dreams together.

I’m also here to present myself as someone who has experiences, and knows how to do things that someone might not know how to, and be looking for, in an effort to achieve their dreams and goals.

I pledged a sorority in college, and I was impressed by the sincerity of the connections here – referring to each other as sisters. Having sisters and friends in this business and industry working together is both important and endearing to me.

I attended the NYWIFT rooftop event at Penthouse 45, and was just embraced with such warmth, I actually chided myself for not having joined sooner.

How do you balance being a multi-hyphenate artist, actress, screenwriter, and engineer?

In the same way a diamond is multi-faceted and looks different at various angles, I think that’s a plausible metaphor for my ability to maintain that balance. It’s not compartmentalized, and they cross each other like support beams.

For instance, I’ve written a project about a dubious student whowas in love with his math teacher and tutor, and incorporated formulas I know from being an engineer. He doesn’t actually need her help, and he’s pretending that he doesn’t know math, just so he can spend time with her, as the time allocated during the class she teaches is insufficient, and has entirely too many students for him to get enough one-on-one time with her. She walks in on him as he’s tutoring one of his clients – a student-athlete – about parabolic equations and discovers that he knew math all along.

I’ve staged a form of this show in Atlanta and intend to work in it as the lead actress in its film adaptation. The common denominator of these roles is imagination, so in that way it makes it rather easy to toggle and shift between them.

Melody on set, combining her technical and creative skills in film production.

What initially drew you to pursue such diverse creative and technical fields?

I could sing before I could speak. My mom is a musician and she undoubtedly sang to me and played the piano for me as she carried me. I was acting and singing as a child and I loved it. At 10 or 11, I took a rejection from a career-launching ensemble cast extremely hard. I attributed it to my talent, when it was actually my lack of preparation. I aced the acting and singing portions, but I straight up winged the dance and choreography portion. It should not have been a surprise to receive that thin letter in the mail, when I had demonstrated that I was two-thirds of a triple threat. I still acted in the wake of that disappointment, but I was changed at my very core.

I attended a junior high school and was in a gifted and talentedschool-within-a-school that was STEM focused, and the intent was to produce more minorities in the fields of science and math. My father is a scientist – a parasitologist – and I came to discover that my grandfather was a mathematician – an accountant – though I never had the pleasure of meeting him.

I was still enamored with English and humanities, and was a voracious reader – I still am. I was struggling in algebra, as I just didn’t understand matrices or what value-add or functional use they would have in my seventh grade life, and I got my first C. While I’d done the best I could muster, I was crestfallen. I’m accustomed to making As and Bs. With some encouragement from my mom, regarding understanding the pattern, I began to rise. Things just began to click. Factoring. Substitutions. Quadratics. Solving for X. By the end of the year, C had gradually morphed into an A.

And ten years later, I was a real, live mechanical engineer. I worked at an oil refinery in Louisiana.

After a layoff from a tech company while working as a consultant and systems tester, I opted to get back to my creative passions, as taking a more conventional path had demonstrated its volatility, I felt I had everything to gain, and nothing to lose. I remembered how much I’d loved acting, yet I was still paralyzed by fear of rejection. I started taking acting classes and renewed my interest, my desire and that spark. If I can solve a quadratic equation, and master calculus, I can go to an audition.

So essentially, a combination of life circumstances, environment, interests, and passions. However, the scientist in me is quite curious about how I followed my grandfather’s footsteps, despite not having met him before. But that’s an entirely different study.

Melody preparing for a role.

How does your engineering background influence your approach to artistic and creative projects?

Excellent question. Although the present condition of my desk may betray me, I am typically highly organized. My engineering background helps me get organized and prioritize activities and tasks, for instance when I’m formulating a pitch for a series episodic or developing a budget for my films. Establishing the scope of work first, and all of the known parameters on a high level, and then I can get to work.

I led a team of four writers, and I was the only woman. Being an engineer helped me formulate the outline, plan tasks, set goals and manage the project. I’ve been in male-dominated environments as an engineer, and could glean from my experiences, as I faced some similar challenges in that creative endeavor.

Can you share how you navigate between the technical and creative sides of your career?

Admittedly, engineering is a form of creativity, and leverages the imagination to make something tangible or innovate an existing idea or condition. From that standpoint, navigation is seamless.

With regard to execution, timing tasks strategically is essential for me. While I do love to write early, early in the morning, it’s the morning where I get mathematically-driven and administrative tasks done. The afternoons and evenings, and sometimes at night is when I’m really focused on cultivating my creativity.

Melody on set.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of working across so many different disciplines?

There are so many instances, which make my response to this question delightfully difficult. I am highly independent, and I love knowing how to do different things and have multiple ways of executing them. I never know when I might have to step into a role or step up because someone or something didn’t come through as anticipated.

The most fulfilling aspect of working across so many different disciplines is completing what I set out to accomplish. I love taking an idea or experience and expanding it into words and characters on a page and then eventually into a three-dimensional space, where thought becomes a tangible, visible reality.

Writing a feature film and having it produced, funded and brought to life is such an incredible experience. I’m also a comedy writer, and when people laugh when I’ve scripted something to be humorous and it hits, it’s enthralling!

I had the pleasure of venturing to Italy for the 77th Biennale in Venice, as Residue was making its world premiere in advance of its September debut on Netflix. I portrayed LaVonne, the mother of protagonist. At the end of the film, the credits roll and include title slides of the actors. There was this magic moment, where I rose from my seat and my face and name were on the big screen. As the audience clapped, I recognized that I was standing at the intersection and junction of imagination and reality.

Teaching myself Adobe Premiere after being intimidated by ithas also been a very rewarding experience. Taking both possession and responsibility as it pertains to having creative control. Knowing what I want and exactly how to execute it is priceless to me. I know iMovie, yet learning Adobe Premiere added a new layer to my storytelling.

Assembling my own mini-doc, CREATOR. even complete with some footage and images I shot and collected was greatly fulfilling. I showed myself that I could do it, and that increased my confidence and faith in myself, and just opened up an entirely new world of possibilities.

Melody performing on stage, engaging with the audience.

Are there any projects where you’re combining your various skills that you’re particularly excited about?

Absolutely! I attended the NYWIFT Summer Soiree at Penthouse 45 for the Leveling Up: Girls In Gaming & VR Development event, and I left feeling inspired and confident, as I had clearly defined next steps to bring the two games that I’ve conceived to fruition.

This fall, I’m releasing a math book, Solving For X, which is a series of math drills, solving linear equations on Amazon. This book is the inception of a new collection, and will join a collection of fashion-driven sketchbooks that I sketched, designed and sewed by hand as miniature models, presently on Amazon.

I began writing a project, Life Lessons Learned While Loving A Forty-Five Year Old Felon, during the pandemic, and it is now packaged as a limited series. This project is very personal – a dark romantic comedy – and writing it, preparing my pitch, and formulating my marketing and distribution plans were particularly enjoyable for me. I’m excited about collaborating with an aggregator who knows how to get it paired with a distributor.

Connect with Melody Tally on IMDb, watch her mini-doc CREATOR. on YouTube, and follow her on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Check out her sketchbooks on Amazon and watch Troop 491: The Adventures of the Muddy Lions on Tubi.

(All images courtesy of Melody Tally)