We recently connected with Sarah Schmidt and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

Three years after leaving my full-time job in pursuit of more freelance, I started paying my friend Ian to help me finish jobs I couldn’t handle on my own. From late 2018 to early 2019, we worked on at least 3 distinct jobs together and started to feel confident pitching on a handful of others. It felt silly to keep paying him on PayPal, and we were really starting to get the hang of it. I am glad I had waited until after I had a few years working physically in-house at another media/animation studio, on a team of about 12-15 people, as well as a few years on my own, before starting our business. If I had started any sooner, I think I would have lacked the experience seeing how projects are handled from conception to delivery, and I think I would have really got lost in the pressure to stand out and make a name for myself. Because of the connections I had made over the years, it has been a more comfortable journey getting to know clients and colleagues better and in a less forceful way. If I were to have waited even longer – maybe after a few stints as a freelancer on retainer for a few other studios, maybe even in a few other cities, I think I would be even more comfortable navigating the growth of our company.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into the business of making animation and illustration work for people by being a curious, excited kid who was equal parts a cartoon head and a music fan. I felt torn when transitioning from high school to college: I really loved drawing characters, but also wished to do album covers and tour posters for my favorite bands someday. When many of my friends left for the trenches of Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to stay behind and work at a boutique motion graphics studio. I loved having the chance to work on all types of different projects – commercials, music videos – and that faster-paced project turnaround more closely resembled what I liked.

Our studio makes media for brands. While we do more compact work like posters and stickers for Giphy / Instagram, we also do a lot of work that involves the full animation process – concept art and design, storyboarding, animation and compositing together. We specialize in 2D hand-drawn animation directly for clients as well as for larger teams and agencies. We are there to help our clients stand out with unique, well-crafted, illustrative work that packs a punch. A lot of people find us though the animation work we did for Adult Swim Smalls, a semi-autobiographical short about working at a gas station in rural Ohio – but a lot of our bread-and-butter work looks a lot different than that!

What sets us apart from others is that we are practice-forward. My partner Ian Ballantyne has a printing MFA from the China Academy of Art and is always finding ways to infuse media studies into his work with 3D animation, print, and sculpture. We are both working on our own narrative animation shorts which we aim to send to animation festivals after completion. Artists we have met at animation festivals and conferences around the world have been integral into our growth as a business. When we need extra help on a project, when we are too busy, or when we know we are not the right fit for a client – we know exactly which friends and colleagues to reach out to.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Ian and I have had similar design and illustration sensibilities since we were 18. We met 8am, Monday morning during our freshman year at Columbus College of Art & Design. The class was called “Design” and he was easy to pick out – a great drafts person who was easy to talk to. We hit it off and hung out a ton between classes – his dorm was down the hall from mine. We would practice for Art History exams by doing really junky redraws of pieces we had to remember; we would stay up late talking about this or that. While I worked at the motion design studio after college, he went to China for his MFA. Before he left, I spent maybe 15 minutes teaching him the ins-and-outs of Flash (now Adobe Animate). He ended up doing a ton of stickers for WeChat while in China, and would show me every time he came home to visit. By the time he earned his degree and was back home, I had quit my job and needed help on the freelance work stacking up. Nobody else had more examples of animation they had been making! The combination of working on a few things together, and attending events like Pictoplasma, really sealed the deal of wanting to do this together full-time.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We host a quarterly animation show, Malt Adult, and have felt nothing but support from and admiration for the arts and media community here in Chicago. When I started the project in 2016, it was partially out of spite for my animation degree: I felt angry that I was unaware about the plethora of independent animation works coming from different colleges – and from self-taught artists – from around the world. When I started working after college, my studio submitted a film we made together to an animation festival in New York called Animation Block Party. Between that, a show called Midsummer Nights Toons, Animation Breakdown!, and GLAS Animation Festival, I found work that I wanted to talk about with friends back home. We started hosting shows in the art gallery down the street from school, which meant I was able to blend together art gallery-going friends as well as the more reclusive comics, illustration, and animation friends I had in town. We’re coming up on our 30th show this fall, and after emailing and screening with over 250 different artists from around the world, it is clear to me that I wouldn’t be anywhere without the consistent work I have put into this passion project. There are days where I can get lost emailing people about their work and setting up playlists to screen at events, I love doing it so much.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thesunshinemall.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesunshinemall/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesunshinemall
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunshine-mall
• Twitter: https://x.com/TheSunshineMall
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarahmaeschmidt
• Other: http://sarahmaeschmidt.com
  https://ianerballantyne.com

Image Credits

Photo by Lily P. McLaughlin