Meet Sarah Schmidt

We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Schmidt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, so glad you were able to set aside some time for us today. We’ve always admired not just your journey and success, but also the seemingly high levels of self-discipline that you seem to have mastered and so maybe we can start by chatting about how you developed it or where it comes from?
Honestly, I think my self-discipline stems from years spent in marching band. High school band was a big deal in my town – rivaling the football team – and the calendar revolved around learning, drilling/practice, performance, and rest. It paid off because we had this amazing sense of community and belonging. I know it has stuck with me over the years because til this day, I still have dreams about marching band… usually when I am going through creative block/strife.

I feel fortunate that I spent years as a kid/teenager drilling and living through performances where our group nailed it as well as performances where we bombed – times where me or my friends totally messed up, etc. Getting yelled at, getting humiliated… but all for the sake of some half-time show or parade. It really made the real world problems I eventually encountered seem easier to handle the ups and downs of. The “performance” of showing up and doing the work still applies to my life, and I like to think I have gotten better at it.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Since 2014, I have been working professionally as an animator for full-time and freelance clients, mostly revolving around social media, ads, and music videos. I draw a lot of my animation pieces in Adobe Animate (I love the line quality, layering, & symbol setup there) on a Wacom Cintiq, though I often workin Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Toon Boom, TV Paint and Dragonframe, too. Too me, nothing is more exciting than getting better at matching movement and characters to what my they look like in my imagination, which is more or less a jumble of 90’s Nickelodeon, Digimon, Neopets, Beanie Babies, and mall punk bands from the mid-2000’s.

Currently, I am an Animation MFA student at DePaul University, working on taking my studio practice more seriously. My hope is that after school, we can expand our business to a larger studio space where we can be more collaborative with clients and friends.

Another big reason I went back to school was to be more academic with my screening series, Malt Adult, which hosts a quarterly screening/zine-release event I curate and host in Chicago, Illinois. I am passionate about independent animation as a medium. It often goes hand-in-hand with commercial animation work, but I feel it is tragically overlooked by many creatives in the field, especially students.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
When studying for my BFA, I was very interested in not only my Animation and Illustration peers, but the work from the kids in the Fine Art department. No one from Animation would ever come with me to “fine art critique night”, which was a shame because I got to really watch people talk about their work in ways that no one ever would in the animation classroom. I learned so much from going to things like that as well as just about every visiting artist talk our campus held. Too many young animators forget that it’s an art form just like any other; too many get wrapped up in the chase for the job.

Speaking of jobs, I spent a bunch of years working at my family’s gas station, which really helped get me out of my box and let me see different sides of people you do not see every day. Same goes for working at an Arby’s: besides the free mozzarella sticks and Jamocha shakes, work like that taught me to hear people out. As I get older, it has been really easy to tell who has worked jobs like that and who hasn’t. Nothing is more uncomfortable than being around someone who acts like they are above the person helping them out!

Over the years I have been trying to become more unashamed for guilty-pleasures: I wish I could tell a younger, more nervous version of myself to not worry so much and just own it. For example, my music taste is really just an extension of the Warped Tour-era brat, and if all of those [mostly boy] bands were able to write whatever dorky songs they wanted, I surely can make whatever art or cartoons I want. My love for this stuff has brought me on board to some of my favorite projects that have ever happened such as a music video for La Dispute and a cartoon for Adult Swim Smalls.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
When I am overwhelmed, I try and do things that just straight up bring me joy and are in my control. I cook a lot of vegan meals for myself and my partner, and I can get pretty obsessed about them. If the house is a wreck or I’ve been too cooped up, I love getting out of the house and getting someone else to cook for me instead!

I am a big proponent of going on walks to clear my head. They are best in the morning to coffee shops or in the afternoons to grocery stores; I know a lot of people swear by walks that don’t need to go anywhere. But gosh if I don’t love a walk where I can call my mom, my brother, or my friend I haven’t talked to in awhile and, like – grab a vegetable for later. Or a nice little juice/can of something!

My sketchbook is a constant bin for each and every overwhelmed moment in my life. I have been finding journals from my childhood on the past few trips back home; it’s really been hitting me that I have always had some type of output of this fashion. I love to treat my sketchbook as a dumping ground for feelings, drawings, and scrapbook bits. I think doing this has also been bangin’ for my memory. I really like to work on them at coffee shops, at a bar, or while watching something I can easily zone out from on TV.

For all my music heads out there: another piece of advice that is simple is to just build playlists for yourself. I cherish my Spotify account and have made monthly playlists since 2014! When I am in a funk, maybe I will go back to the playlist from last month to try and remind myself of the good moods I was in at that time. I like to revisit the monthly playlist from a year, or several years, prior to really get my gears turning. There is this overrated animation trope from The Animator’s Survival Kit about not listening to music while you animate, but gosh, I think it’s bogus! I really can reach a good flow state if I have the right type of thing in my ears. A lot of the time, admittedly, it’s music I would have liked as a teenager.

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