Getting to know Matt Wong

(bell dinging) - As a kid my interests were sports. I loved playing outside, but more academically, I love math and science. One year for Christmas, my mom and dad got me a chemistry set and I went wild with it. I almost lit the house on fire. My first film here at Pixar was Partly Cloudy. It was a short film, directed by Pete Sohn. The cloud characters were originally hard surface characters, but we used particles to turn them in to fluffy cloud characters. The thing I like most about being an effects artist is the variety. I get to do water, fire, fireworks, smoke, dust. It's a little bit of everything. In effects we always work in teams. We split up the work into various shots, but we're always looking at each other's work, comparing each other's techniques, solutions to problems. It's a very collaborative effort. We give and take from each other, and we kinda try to match the look amongst the entire team. In effects, we usually deal with big hard problems. We almost always get it wrong the first time, the second time, and the third time. We do things over and over and over again, until we get them right. For some of the most difficult shots, I must have done it at least 15, 20 times before I got it right. And even then it maybe needed a few more iterations to get it exactly right.