[Level Up KL 2023] Sherwyn Wong Shares His Journey On Achieving His Dreams On Being A 3D Pixar Animator

During our time at Level Up KL 2023, we had the chance to tune into a conference by Sherwyn Wong, a Malaysian who achieved his dreams on working as a 3D Animator in Pixar.

As a city kid who grew up loving movies and drawing, Sherwyn’s parents began to consider a career path for him. He was first introduced to architecture during a study fair, but ultimately knew it wasn’t for him; until he came across The One Academy, which had showcased movies and animation.

Sherwyn was then determined to take up animation as a career path, with a dream to pursue his studies in the USA, and joining big name companies such as Pixar, Disney, or Lucasfilms.

His journey was an arduous one, with him facing many challenges. However, before Sherwyn pursed his studies in the States, he had joined a studio by the name of Illusionist Animation Studios for almost a year, and was even involved in the making of Netflix’ “Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac”.

He shared how hard it was to compete with a lot of other brilliant students in the Academy of Art University, and had described it as “a different kind of beast” as compared to his time at The One Academy.

Sherwyn had mentioned that his lecturers had experiences in different big named studios, and loved how very open they were on sharing their ways of animating, workflow and so on.

One of the hardships that Sherwyn had faced was that he actually had gotten an internship offer from Pixar back in 2021, but had to give up on it due to VISA issues as well as the pandemic during the time; which dealt a blow to his mental health.

Sherwyn still didn’t want to give up on his dreams on joining Pixar. During the meantime, he joined Halon, a VFX Studio where he further honed his skills while improving his mental health.

Sherwyn had told us that he applied for Pixar last year but got rejected. However, Pixar had actually remembered that he was offered for an internship and they contacted Sherwyn back; which made him very emotional during the interviews because they had remembered him.

Not long after that, he secured the offer and started working at Pixar on January this year, and was involved in various of projects, learning from his idols and so on. Sherwyn had also mentioned that there were also a handful of other Malaysian there in Pixar as well, where he expressed that Malaysians have a lot of potential as well.

“What separates Malaysians from the big boys (US, Europe, Japan), [is that] we have a lot of talents.” quoted Sherwyn.

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