We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelly Emmrich. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelly below.
Hi Kelly, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
In my senior year of college, I was fully ensconced in the writing and English department. I had an elective available, so I decided to enroll in Animation 1. I’d always loved drawing and art as a kid, but at 21, I had accepted that it would be a lifelong hobby of mine. From the first class of learning the basics, I knew that I wasn’t meant to write full time. I wanted to be an animator. Each creative field seems so different from the outside. Writing and drawing are two different skillsets. At the root, though, both mediums are used to convey emotion and tell stories. There was something that was just inherently poetic and calming about animation. Each frame felt like a sigh of relief after nearly four years of struggling with my words.
Kelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m currently a freelance 2D animator and illustrator living in Brooklyn. I started animating professionally on a small scale in 2020. During the early days of the pandemic I was working as a line cook and beer label designer at a brewery. In my free time, I worked on getting better at animation. As I honed my craft, I started to receive commissions through social media and word of mouth. That year, I mostly worked with musicians, creating music videos, promos, album covers, and Spotify canvases. Now, in addition to musicians, I work with larger brands for their advertising needs. Most of my jobs have come from the right person seeing my animation work on Instagram and Tiktok and forming a connection through that. I’ve been incredibly lucky in that front. Since my work is largely frame by frame and 2D, my animations feel more organic and nostalgic.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
I think it’s difficult for people in more analytical careers to fully understand the work and the challenge that comes with having a creative profession. Especially as a woman in animation, I struggle to get my work taken seriously. My work has been reduced numerous times as doodles, little pictures, and cartoons only for kids. I think it’s easy to dismiss my career as a frivolous one because from the outside it looks easy. I get to draw. I get to work from home. I have the freedom to pick my own projects that I want to pursue. But the bottom line is that, while this is my passion and my chosen field that I love, it is my career as well. It deserves to be taken seriously. I’d say that about 60 percent of my working hours are taken up with emailing clients, signing contracts, and invoicing.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
When I first started animating professionally in 2020, I used animation as a way to calm myself down and just get lost in the lull of drawing frame after frame. I started getting comments on social media that people would use my animations similarly. Whether people were suffering from panic attacks or overwhelmed in their daily lives, people were using my videos to calm down and recenter themselves. I think my intentions started from there. I use my art as a means of escapism, and I hope that I continue to offer people a world to escape to just for a moment.
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