Short-Form Queen
Former competitive skateboarder Katy Schlemmer has blazed her own path as one of the top content creators for celebrities and brands. Here, the 29-year-old Orange County, California, native shares how she’s used nostalgia, candy colors, and unshakable optimism to forge a creative career with lots of pop.
One of Katy’s recent brand collaborations: Polaris Slingshot.
From the ages of 12 through 15, I was a competitive skateboarder sponsored by Pacsun and Monster Energy, among others. I competed in the California Amateur Skateboard League (CASL) as the only girl in my division.
Even back then, I was making visuals and thinking about branding marketing. I would use a self-timer or beg my little brother (usually the latter) to snap pictures of me skating for my sponsors. I would go online and use Photobucket to add creative edits and effects to the photos and add in sponsor branding and logos, and I eventually even started creating sponsor newsletters to send to fans/brands.
I went on to create my own skate team and website, rounding up some of the younger neighborhood kids to join, making my own swag (I designed the logo, boards, etc.) and making a skateboarding video edit for my sponsors.
An early video of Katy skateboarding in her neighborhood with a friend.
Fast forward several years, and I’m finishing up my film degree at Cal State Long Beach. I’m sponsored by GoPro for skating/surfing, and Instagram finally introduces the capability of posting 15-second videos to share, as opposed to just photos. I start making little 15-second adventure/lifestyle edits (surfing, skating, hiking, beach) using my GoPro, which starts getting me attention on Instagram.
While in college, I make a reel of all my GoPro content and become the media intern at a skate/tattoo shop in LA named Kingswell Los Feliz. The responsibilities included attending their monthly events and shooting, editing, and delivering event recap videos. I didn’t own any camera equipment at this point besides my GoPro, so one of the shop owners would let me borrow his Canon 5D to shoot on nights of events.
These events would be parties and showcases collaborating with skate brands, artists, skate photographers, etc. A young, hungry, eager, excited, creative student, I would go to class during the day and commute two hours from Orange Country in traffic to navigate the beat-up streets of LA in my clunky 1968 Ford F250. Then I’d drive home super late at night and start editing recap for delivery within 24 to 48 hours.
From the archive (clockwise from top): Katy uses a GoPro to capture herself surfing; waxing her board; and with her first surfboard.
While in my last year of college, and with this new experience and GoPro reel, I became a video editor at a website company. I edited 90-second mini-documentaries for clients like Wetzel’s Pretzels, Cinnabon, Pepsi, and Compass. We had a small in-house studio for shooting interviews, product, and podcasts, and I learned a lot from working with a small team of creatives. I took advantage of the available resources at this job in my downtime or after hours—I would use the podcast room to record voiceovers for my own videos, use the cameras and lighting to shoot my own headshots, develop branding, and play around in Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects.
I also started creating cinemagraphs from some of my own photographs or video stills. I shared some of these on Instagram, and they proved to be popular. Considering short-form content wasn’t really a thing yet and Instagram mainly housed photography and short travel videos, I was really intrigued with exploring this type of snappy content.
Before long, small brands began to discover me on IG. One of the very first was Liquid IV (which had probably under 5,000 followers at the time). Liquid IV was my first retainer client. I created videos and photography for them every quarter for around three years, until the company was sold after newfound success.
Two of Katy’s early cinemagraphs.
After graduating college in 2016 and shortly after being laid off from my website job, I bought my first real camera, a Sony A7S II, and went full freelance. A few months into that, a client who really loved my work, Blenders Eyewear, offered to move me to San Diego to work as their full-time brand photographer. I accepted their offer and work my way up to being their lead content producer. While at this company, I really started experimenting with stop-motion and vfx, and creating short-form video content for campaigns. I got some photos published on billboards, in magazines, and on storefronts, as well as got to work with some pro athletes I really admired. I helped REALLY grow this company and establish a brand identity. Meanwhile, I started to get noticed by Will Smith’s agency Westbrook, and I did a couple of shoots for a clothing-brand client of theirs. This led to the opportunity of shooting Will at a red-carpet premiere.
I was using my paid time off for these shoots, and eventually Blenders gave me the ultimatum of staying and only doing work for them or leaving and continuing my own creative endeavors. So naturally, I put in my two weeks’ notice. A day later, Will’s team asked me if I was available to spend the first two weeks of 2020 traveling Europe with him for the Bad Boys for Life press tour. I said yes, and this really kicked off my solo creative career. Through Westbrook, I wound up also doing work for people like Jason Derulo and Alicia Keys, and that led to my fostering my own personal connections. Soon I was working with people like Martin Lawrence, Jay Shetty, and a multitude of brands.
I’ve been full freelance ever since, primarily making short-form content for commercial brands, celebs, and the world’s biggest music festivals.
From top: One of Katy’s promo pieces from the Bad Boys for Life tour in 2020; Will Smith at a Spies in Disguise opening.
Made by Katy
Dorito’s
Clark’s
Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden
Step banking
Portola Music Festival
About That Honda Collab
Honda held a campaign for their 2022 Civic where they handpicked four of their favorite content creators across the globe to create a handful of unique videos showcasing the car’s capabilities. I was among the four.
They asked me to create three short-form deliverables for social media and advertising. I pitched the concepts via video calls for approval then worked with the respective teams to handle all the logistics of shooting: location scouting, road closures, legalities, etc. My pitch centered on the idea of the Civic and the diversity of California’s landscape (mountains, beach, desert), so we locked down three shoot days at each of these locations.
The other three creators wound up working their concepts into these locations, since their concepts weren’t location specific like mine. I was also the only creator with a cast, so I was responsible for styling the talent and sending pictures of them to the creative director for approval before shooting.
Katy Schlemmer is a short-form content creator based in Orange County, California.