Meet The Magnopians: Andreia Amaral
This week we caught up with Andreia Amaral to hear about her role as a Producer, what inspires her, and the biggest lessons she’s learned during her career.
Magnopus is a diverse team of artists, designers, and engineers with studios in the US and UK. We create, deploy, and operate, cross-reality experiences at scale. In this series, you’ll get to know each and every one of us!
Andreia’s trajectory to working at Magnopus in production wasn’t super linear. She graduated from Law School in Brazil but decided that she wasn’t so passionate about Law itself, so changed her career path to study and work in marketing. She had the opportunity to work at a Marketing Agency managing clients and influencers, but wanted to go back to school to get her Master’s and decided to do something with art and technology.
What attracted you to Magnopus?
That’s kind of an interesting story! I was living in New York, getting my master’s degree in Museums and Digital Culture because I love art. I ended up really falling for the technology and digital side of the master’s degree. I started looking at L.A. as it is definitely a place where technology is booming, and then I ended up falling into the game industry — even though it was a completely different career path than I thought I was going to take! Then I had the opportunity to work at Magnopus, which was embodying everything that I was looking for in technology excitement-wise.
What, or who inspires you?
What really gives me inspiration, especially at Magnopus, is that in each project we have a new technology to work with. That’s really cool for me, to learn different things with every new project. For example, you can be in a project and you’re using Augmented Reality (AR), and then all of a sudden we’re working with Virtual Reality (VR). We’re constantly working with crazy technology that we either invent or improve on. It’s really inspiring to wake up every day, like, “what am I going to learn today?”.
What is one app, or software, you couldn’t do your job without?
Working in production, I definitely rely on Miro boards. I’m a very visual and organized person so using those, everything is concentrated in one place. It’s collaborative, so engineers can post things, artists can post things, we can post feedback, we can use the information to create a road map, whatever we need for production.
What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
I love cooking, experimenting with food, and trying to figure out new recipes. I recently used my air fryer to make fried chicken that my friend said was better than Chick-fil-A, so I’ll take that as a compliment!
I also love spending time with my dogs. I recently got a new puppy, so my husband and I like to train them both a lot.
What skills are essential for anyone in your role?
For production, you definitely need to be very organized. You also need to be proactive and chase things down all the time. But a big skill for me, that was kind of surprising, was empathy. As a producer, you need to be there for the team because they trust you with not only work information, but with personal things that will affect their work. You really need to be empathetic to what people are going through and help them with whatever they need so they can do their best work.
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
That you need to give people chances to do what they’re passionate about. It’s very interesting because sometimes somebody is hired to do a specific job, but when you get to know them, you realize that they’re actually interested in doing other things or trying other areas. If someone wants to challenge themselves in other departments, you need to help them and give them a chance to flourish. By giving them a chance, they might end up doing a great job in areas that you didn’t even know they could.
What are you reading/listening to right now?
Right now, I’m actually reading a really cool book called The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger. It’s about the 15 years that he was CEO of Disney. I’ve only just started reading it, but it was highly recommended by one of my best friends. I love reading books with lessons and stuff that you can apply to all your daily life.
What’s your go-to karaoke song?
So this might be a little corny, but I always go for Maroon 5 songs, even though they’re not my favorite band, my dad liked them too. I used to memorize all the songs, so every time there’s karaoke I just think of my dad and just go crazy singing Maroon 5!
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
I’d really like to have the power of teleportation because I have my family in Brazil still, so my grandma and my older brother do live there. My parents and sisters live in the US, but in Florida, so the other side of the country to me. It would be lovely to just get to see family and friends that are all over the world in a heartbeat.
If you could wake up in the body of another person (just for one day) who would it be and why?
That’s hard. Because it would be only for a day. But I love art a lot, it’s one of my main passions, especially the Italian Renaissance era. I think if I could choose, it would be Michelangelo because I really want to live in the Italian Renaissance for a little bit and see the mind and feel the mind of a true artist.
