May 21, 2019

Life and Work with Amanda Schrembeck

Local Stories

Image Credit:
Sean Robertson, Linda McNeilToday we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Schrembeck.

Amanda, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I always had a strength and interest in drawing since I was a kid so I decided to go to the University of Georgia in 2009 to pursue a fine arts degree in just that. However in my first year I unexpectedly fell in love with printmaking and decided to switch my emphasis. I felt more aligned with printmaking because it lended itself well to people who not only enjoy drawing but also have quite a bit of patience learning the strenuous and meticulous process. I also found love in printing; I met Andrew, my now fiancé, at a printmaking conference my senior year at UGA, so the medium holds a very special place in my heart. However my dreams of being an independent printmaker never really came to be. Andrew and I ran our own print shop called Nocturne Press for about 3 years, but it quickly turned into a hobby when it just wasn’t making enough income.

At this point I felt like my only way into a creative career was to become a graphic designer, which thankfully was a natural fit for me. I worked a couple of production artist roles for a few years before finally landing my first agency gig at Dagger, which is where I’ve been for the past 3 years. Dagger was honestly the first company to invest in me and encourage me to learn new skills, which is exactly how I fell into animation. With the help of a lot of online tutorials and co-workers, I managed to teach myself enough to move into a motion designer role professionally. Presently, this is my biggest accomplishment especially as a female in an extremely male-heavy industry. That gender gap alone ultimately inspired me to start OK Motion Club.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Definitely not. Unfortunately for most artists it’s never a smooth road, whether that’s trying to find work or just being seen as a legit career. As for myself, I liked so many different forms of art that I could never find my niche, because of that I struggled to find the right career path. I was reprimanded in school for not honing in on one style, so as an artist I always assumed this was a bad thing. However once I landed my first design job in an agency I quickly realized being multi-faceted was the key to my success. I’m able to jump into different projects and kind of approach them from any angle that’s best suited, whether that’s analog hands-on techniques or digital. It wasn’t an easy road getting in the door at an agency though. I graduated from UGA in 2013 and it took me 3 years to get a job that I was proud to tell people I had. Let’s just say I cried a lot during those 3 years, and constantly looked at other people with the jobs I wanted knowing I had what it took to be in their position. Unfortunately that’s not how it works to get hired, so I accepted that just having a bachelors degree won’t get you anywhere without putting in more effort. I basically just started coming up with my own fake projects to show companies I knew what I was doing since no one else was going to give me the opportunity. The best advice I can give anyone is just to keep at it and always strive to learn more and improve. I encourage women to never stop having confidence in yourself and knowing what you’re capable of.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with OK Motion Club – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Like I mentioned before, I kind of work in a lot of different mediums, honestly whatever brings me joy or peaks my interest at the time. But professionally I’m currently working at Dagger as a motion designer, I was formally a visual designer there for 2 years, and I also work on their side venture Butter.ATL as an art director and content creator. After hours I focus most of my time working on OK Motion Club, which is a female animation collective started by myself and Linda McNeil. Back in December I realized there was a pretty big hole in the city of Atlanta for female animators to share their work, and coincidentally my friend/fellow animator Linda came to the same conclusion. So we decided to team up and try and create just that, a place to grow our own work but also inspire other women to take up the medium. I think we’re both pretty sarcastic in nature, the name OK Motion Club came from a joke that we’re just okay at animating, we realize we’re not masters in our industry (not yet anyways.) It’s been less than 6 months since we started working together, and I think we’re both pleasantly surprised with the amount of support we’ve received and the unexpected freelance work to come out of it. For now we’ve focused our efforts on just making fairly short eye-catching visuals. Because animation is so tedious, it can sometimes take hours to make even 1 second of movement. In order to be able to post more frequently to Instagram and just get a cool idea out of our heads, we try and keep it simple. I think our goal is to eventually open it up to other female animators to start sharing as well, but for now we’re just trying to grow the brand and our own personal work that we don’t get the opportunity to do during day.

Were there people and/or experiences you had in your childhood that you feel laid the foundation for your success?
Well I pretty much knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind since I was a kid and thankfully my parents never stifled that creativity in me. I grew up with an older brother so I naturally was/am still today pretty tomboyish and nerdy, and I was also really into video games which helped influenced my style. I didn’t start animating professionally until about 2 years ago, but looking back now I actually had an interest in it at a pretty young age. My brother and I used to make up fictional characters and then I would illustrate and animate them frame by frame in Powerpoint of all programs. I eventually upgraded to Flash, now Adobe Animate, and made a couple of animations that were truly awful but at the time I was pretty proud of myself. I’d say the most invaluable things I had as a child that got me to where I am today were my parents providing me with the tools and support to create something and just having all the free time in the world to learn. When you’re a kid you don’t have any anxiety or pressure that you’re wasting time to learn something new, but it’s never too late it just takes more effort.

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