Having grown up in South Korea where “Transformers” was not a part of the Saturday morning cartoon canon, Youngil Pyo and Stan Seo knew nothing about Optimus Prime and Megatron. But when their visual effects company, Digital Domain, inherited the “Transformers” movie, Pyo and Seo, both digital artists, got the chance to help bring the ‘80s cartoon to the big screen. The project soon became one of the pair’s favorite. Who wouldn’t love creating giant robots that transform into cell phones or make flying comets come to life?

Pyo, 33, and Seo, 39, longtime friends who work together at the Venice, Calif., company — considered one of the most innovative in the industry — first met at the Academy of the Arts in San Francisco, where both were international students from Seoul attracted by the minimal English skills required in the design-based program. Although they both still struggle with English, their technical and artistic skills have made them desirable assets in this cutting edge industry.

Seo, who left behind a career in product design in Korea to study visual effects in the States, knew that computer graphics were on the rise while product design was becoming an overly saturated and competitive industry. Pyo, who studied automotive engineering in Korea, left for the States after his mandatory military service to pursue his lifelong fascination with movie making.

“[In college] instead of going to class, sometimes I watched two or three movies a day,” Pyo says. “I was really into the graphics.”

After graduating, both got jobs at a smaller graphics firm called The Orphanage. But the two dreamed of working at Digital Domain. Pyo, who started working there four years ago, got his job after submitting his application for the fourth time. Pyo was able to help Seo get a job at the company a couple years later.

Both married with two young children each, the friends have remained close, although Pyo still refers to Seo as “hyeong” and addresses him with the Korean form of respect for elders.

As part of a team of artists that worked on Michael Bay’s “Transformers,” Seo and Pyo tinkered with everything from how to get the Transformers to transform in as few screenshots as possible and how to make a Transformer/comet hurdling toward the earth look realistic all the way down to the debris left in its path.

“All Michael Bay wanted was just to [make the scenes] look cool. He’s very straightforward,” says Seo.

“There was a lot of freedom for people to do a lot of things,” says David Hodgins, Pyo and Seo’s CG supervisor at Digital Domain. Because it was a smaller project with a smaller team, Pyo and Seo were able to dip into more specialized areas. The scenes and characters they were responsible for, according to Hodgins, were also particularly challenging.

“You think it’s a small scene. It’s just a cell phone, but then the cell phone becomes the whole screen when it transforms,” continues Hodgins. “There was a lot of detail.”