For as long as he can remember, Mr Jerrold Chong, 34, wanted to be a filmmaker. The film bug bit him during his early teens and although most aspiring students might gravitate towards live-action films, he chose animation.
However, the path to giving life to his dream has been rocky.
After completing a prestigious animation course in California in 2016, he had to turn down a job at Pixar, probably the best-known large company in the world of animation.
“I was offered an internship for animation at Pixar after I graduated, but due to some scholarship constraints, I had to return (to Singapore) immediately,” Mr Chong said.
“That’s something that I still sort of look back on sometimes, on the ‘what if’,” he said, adding that some of his classmates had gone on to work on Pixar and Disney films.
Still, he now sees that missed opportunity as a blessing in disguise, because he went on to establish his own small studio called Finding Pictures, with some peers, rather than becoming a small cog in a giant global studio.
“The joy of being in Singapore and bringing all those ideas and knowledge here, setting up an independent community and your own studio … it’s much more fulfilling than joining a big studio.”
Through hard slog, sweat and tears, his self-made career and Finding Pictures have gained recognition at major film festivals, including Cannes in France.
The studio also broke new ground by doing the animation for the music video of the 2021 National Day theme song.
“I think what’s special about my journey so far is I came back wanting to continue this independent practice as a filmmaker and to be able to do more.”
For Mr Chong, animation has always been about creating stories by building a world of his own.
“A lot of craft goes into creating your characters. They could be fantastical, surreal or completely out of this world, and those stories appealed to me,” Mr Chong told CNA TODAY, his focused stare piercing through thin, rectangular glasses perched on his nose.
“There’s also an element of magic to be able to not just create your own story, but within that, also create your world, your own set of characters.”
Before reaching this point of being a full-time animator-filmmaker running an animation studio with four other co-founders and a team of more than 10 artists, animators and illustrators, a more conventional career came first for him.
Mr Chong was an art teacher.
After returning from California in the United States, he would teach during the day and make films into the wee hours of the night.
On weekends, he was deep in the trenches of his craft, leading a double life constantly marked by exhaustion, passion and late-night animating in an industrial warehouse in Tuas, made available to him by one of Mr Chong’s artist friends.
“We would animate from 7pm until 2am,” he recounted. He explained in a firm tone that when animating a scene for stop-motion, “you must finish the scene”.
Any delay in filming the stop-motion sequence and the set could “shift” ever so slightly, whether from humidity, vibrations or an unnoticed nudge, thereby disrupting the entire sequence.
Stop-motion animation is physically manipulating objects in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when played in sequence.
Mr Chong works across multiple forms of animation, including stop-motion and 2D animation.
