Heartland Animation: Sarah Schmidt’s Independent Route To Adult Swim (EXCLUSIVE)
By Jamie Lang | 11/04/2025 10:33 am |
When animator Sarah Schmidt got the commission for her latest Adult Swim Smalls short, she wasn’t thinking about timing. “This one is a spooky story,” she said. “So it ended up being all right to deliver it around Halloween.”
Sarah Schmidt
The e…
Heartland Animation: Sarah Schmidt’s Independent Route To Adult Swim (EXCLUSIVE)
By Jamie Lang | 11/04/2025 10:33 am |
When animator Sarah Schmidt got the commission for her latest Adult Swim Smalls short, she wasn’t thinking about timing. “This one is a spooky story,” she said. “So it ended up being all right to deliver it around Halloween.”
Sarah Schmidt
The episode is the third in her trilogy for the Smalls program, a haunted slice of Midwest folklore inspired by her family’s gas station. It’s weird, funny, and unmistakably regional, much like Schmidt herself. Based in Chicago, she’s building a career that proves you don’t have to live in Los Angeles or New York to make nationally recognized animation for one of the big studios.
Schmidt’s path has been as unconventional as her work. When she was approached to make the first episode, “I was still back in Ohio, applying for grad school,” she recalled. “So I’m like, ‘Well, you got me at this window. We’re going to send you this animation and then I’m going to disappear for a while.’” Of course, best laid plans change, and now she’s made three shorts.
That do-it-yourself rhythm has carried through all of her projects, commercial and original. “It has just been me pulling most of the weight,” she explained of her production pipeline. “My animation partner, Ian [Ballantyne], my fiancé, has been doing a lot of the in-betweens.”
That independence defines her visual style, rooted in the worlds she grew up in. “I basically grew up with all the ’90s Nickelodeon cartoons,” she said. “And then once I got internet access, I got really into Neopets.com — very heavily illustrated, cute little guys, cute little characters everywhere. Between that and Homestar Runner, I spent a lot of time in that Flash web-based game and animation world. It just kind of happened that way.”
Her Smalls shorts reflect an early internet spirit. “I realized, oh, this is kind of why my stuff looks like it’s locked in time,” she said. “It’s just comfy drawing in this place, I essentially was mentally for many years growing up.”
Schmidt also balances her creative work with running a small studio and teaching while finishing her MFA. “We started our LLC animation business in 2019,” she said. “Right before the pandemic, which kind of helped us out when it did happen, because a lot of commercial studios were like, ‘Oh shoot, we can’t shoot live action stuff. What do we do with this budget?’ So we had a lot of time to make animation stickers and little commercials we maybe wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”
Not every job is glamorous, but it keeps her independent. “It’s been a lot of taking jobs that feel a little out of what we’re normally doing aesthetically,” she said. “Like more motion graphics-type things — we did a dog food commercial. Lots of long periods of working on stuff that maybe isn’t what we want to do all the time, but it pays the bills. It keeps the lights on.”
Those commercial projects also sharpen her creative discipline. “It’s been really helpful to have these grounded jobs that have deadlines and expectations,” she said. “It’s been really helpful that the Adult Swim Smalls program is kind of a commission versus a personal project. It’s kind of a mixture of both.”
That said, it takes a lot of hard work to go to grad school, run a studio, handle commissioned work, and develop original projects. “It’s a lot of balancing, a lot of wearing different hats,” she said. “But it feels worth it to keep feeding the people the silly gas station cartoon.”
From her studio in Chicago, Sarah Schmidt is quietly proving that the future of animation doesn’t have to run through Hollywood. Sometimes, it starts at a haunted gas pump in the Midwest.
Directed, Created, & Written by Sarah Schmidt
VO by Ian Ballantyne, Deanna Belos, Mo Doron, Eric Egan, Jer Hunter, Sarah Schmidt, and Alan Steadman
Animation by Ian Ballantyne and Sarah Schmidt
Music by Gouge Away “The Sharpening”
Sound Design by Brent Busby
Special Thanks to Andrea Rawson