(ABS-CBN) When H.E.R. won the Best Original Song category for her song “Fight for you” in the Oscars, Filipinos were beaming with pride — another Filipino showcasing world-class talent. But there’s another reason to celebrate.

Meet Paul Abadilla, the set art director of the Oscar-winning animated movie “Soul.”

This California-based artist migrated to the United States when he was seven years old. But in his childhood years in the Philippines, he was engrossed with cartoons and animation.

“It was drawing and all these cartoons that I’ve been watching, [it] is a way for me to escape and just really enjoy myself. And I’m just in the zone when I’m drawing,” he told ABS-CBN News.

Abadilla pursued his passion and when the doors of the animated film studio Pixar opened, he grabbed the opportunity to get his dream job.

“When I first started on the project, I started as a set designer. That’s what I’ve been doing most of my time in Pixar, I design the backgrounds, the world on our films. And few months in, I was promoted to set art director and that was a game changer, because now I have this larger responsibility of really setting the tone, the visual language of the film, helping our set designers flesh it out. The designs, the drawing, so we can work with our technical team, so they can build this environment,” he said.

And build they did. The project was a tall order for Abadilla, but he accepted the challenge. If you’ve seen the film, there were two worlds created — the real world and the pre-“Soul” one.