N.B. TikToker aims for a ‘Melo Moon’
Moneeb Kassimi is your typical third-year mechanical engineering student.
As he walks through the long, narrow corridors of Head Hall at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, N.B., he runs into a classmate and the pair exchange a firm handshake.
“Are you coming to class today?” his classmate asks.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Kassimi replies.
While he doesn’t usually share it with friends, Kassimi is the man behind TikTok account @TheMeloMoon. Over the past two years, he has amassed a global audience of 4.4 million followers, with another 13.1 thousand on Instagram.
Kassimi became interested in social media at a young age, inspired by YouTubers like Casey Neistat and Derek Muller. He started to dabble in his own content under the name “MrMonster” when he was 13 years old.
“I thought it was really cool to create content and be able to edit and create things that people enjoy,” said Kassimi. “That’s when I started to try to get creative and I started making some skits.”
His first videos flopped.
Building a presence on social media is tricky — something Kassimi didn’t know at the time. But he wasn’t discouraged, mainly because he enjoyed the content he created.
Kassimi gained his first bit of internet fame with a video about homemade trading card games (TCGs). Made popular by games like 1993’s “Magic: The Gathering,” TCGs mix strategic deck-building elements with trading card features.
“I posted a video of some cards I made and that one actually gained a couple of views,” said Kassimi.
Kassimi gained around 300 subscribers as a result of that video’s success. He decided to tailor his content to TCGs for a couple of months until deciding that it was time to move on and branch out.
That’s when TikTok entered his life.
“I actually got started with TikTok in 2020, and I think that’s when a lot of people hopped on, with COVID and stuff, people were bored at home,” he said.
“At that point, I didn’t really know what it was. I heard about it, and people were talking about it, but I didn’t know how it worked.”
TikTok is a social media platform where users post short-form videos like jokes, dances and other entertainment, similar to older apps like Vine and Dubsmash.
Kassimi decided to give it a shot.
He posted his first few TikToks leading up to the summer of 2020. Much like his first YouTube videos, they didn’t take off. But this time around, he didn’t go into it with the mindset of quickly gaining significant attention.
Fast forward to May 4, 2020.
“I posted a comedy skit … and that one was the first one that gained some traction, and it got a couple hundred thousand views,” said Kassimi.
In the video, Kassimi plays a teacher and a mother, wearing black 3D movie glasses to portray the teacher and a navy blue t-shirt to portray the mother.
The teacher explains to the mother that her son was expelled. When she asks what happened, the teacher responds by saying his student had thrown paper.
The mother is visibly confused by this answer — until she is introduced to a student, who enters the scene with his head wrapped in bandages, aptly named “Paper.”
As of June 13, 2022, the video has been viewed 1.1 million times, garnering more than 152,000 likes.
“I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it,” said Kassimi.
“I could see the number on the screen; I could see it was a million views, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what that meant — that a million people around the world had seen my video.”
After the skit went viral, Kassimi had a sudden influx of followers, which inspired him to post regularly. But that small spike soon died down.
He tried creating skits similar to that first video, but nothing worked.
“It felt like no matter what I posted, it wasn’t really gaining traction,” said Kassimi. “But again, I continued on because followers are secondary … but eventually I created what we call a green screen video.”
One of TikTok’s many appeals is its wide variety of filters, such as “Green Screen.” The effect allows creators to use photos from a smartphone’s camera roll as their video’s background image.
It is popular among TikTok accounts that specialize in videos involving fun facts, news and conspiracies. Kassimi felt intrigued and inspired by this content style, so he made it his own.
Posted on June 12, 2020, Kassimi’s first green screen video revealed what certain phone cases say about one’s personality.
“That one took off faster than any video I had [recorded] to that point,” he said.
“It was kind of impromptu. I didn’t have a script; it wasn’t a skit, it wasn’t a joke that I took from somewhere else — it was just me talking about it.”
Kassimi is a storyteller by nature.
It dates back to his time in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets when he participated in effective speaking competitions. Each competition involved preparing a five-minute pitch and then presenting it to a crowd.
“That was, I think, one of the critical points that made me realize I enjoyed storytelling,” said Kassimi.
The traction from his green screen TikTok videos, which Kassimi believes gained him 30,000 followers at the time, allowed him to understand exactly how much people enjoy that content niche.
He has since focused on this style of storytelling, straying only occasionally to post the odd comedy skit.
A lot of work goes into making Kassimi’s videos.
For some of his recent posts, where he shares with his fanbase spooky mysteries similar to that of campfire stories, he spends several hours researching, writing and memorizing scripts, gathering photos, and finally filming.
Not every idea makes the cut, with about 95 per cent getting scrapped, but the finished products result in thousands of views overnight.
Kassimi is humble when he speaks of his work and its evolution over time. From YouTube to TikTok, one of the biggest lessons he has learned is to stay focused on what he enjoys, not what brings in views.
“If I sat down from day one that I started TikTok, didn’t post a single video and just brainstormed what to make, I probably would have never made [green screen] stories,” he said.
Working as a content creator in a smaller province like New Brunswick can have a few downsides.
Kassimi feels there are some aspects to the job he’s missing out on, which he admits can often feel isolating.
Being in a city like Fredericton forces him to miss out on networking events and other social gatherings. Most content creators live in larger cities like Los Angeles, New York or Toronto, which make way for more opportunities.
Still, Kassimi likes to see the advantages, noting that life in a smaller city helps keep him grounded.
“It’s quite easy to get lost in the sauce when you go to somewhere like Los Angeles,” he said.
“It adds another whole element of difficulty to navigate the social media world because you have people watching or trying to take advantage.”
That sense of staying grounded also helps Kassimi in his social life. Up until recently, many of his friends didn’t even know he was a TikToker.
But it’s not necessarily because he didn’t want them to find out.
“I just do my own thing. Some people hear about it, some don’t, and that’s fine with me,” said Kassimi.
“A lot of people think that if you have followers on social media, your life will change and people will treat you in a certain way. Although that is true in certain circumstances, I think I was lucky that a lot of the friends I have are real friends and that hasn’t changed.”
Kassimi doesn’t believe in setting up a rigid structure for his social media future. He doesn’t want to risk losing out on his creativity and passion for the work just for the sake of growth.
He’s passionate about the mechanical engineering degree with which he will graduate in 2023, but he does see the very real possibility of content creation becoming his full-time gig.
And thanks to the power of social media, it could happen right here in New Brunswick.
“It was something I would never have thought I would be saying before starting TikTok,” said Kassimi.
Aaron Sousa is a journalism student at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. This story was written for Power of The Narrative.