From “Detective Pikachu” to the Oscars: she is Ivel Hernández, the Mexican who worked on the visual effects of the multi-nominated “Dune”

The most nominated films at the 2022 Oscars 0:53 (CNN Spanish) — Warner Bros.’s Dune is one of the films with the most nominations at the 2022 Oscars. With a total of 10, it came in second place one of the most nominated for this year’s Academy Awards, only behind The Power of the Dog, which has 12. One of Dune’s nominations at the Oscars is for “best visual effects”, a category in which it has already was crowned less than two weeks ago at the BAFTAs. The great work in that category was carried out, according to IMDb, thanks to hundreds of visual effects artists, among them the Mexican Ivel Hernández (whose name does not appear on the Dune cast list on IMDb, but who you can find around the time 2:33:15 of the film on HBO Max, in the part of the credits called “FX TDS”). Ivel is 28 years old, from Mexico City, and studied Animation and Digital Art at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, CDMX campus. “I focused a lot on video games, so I have a very good programming background. That allowed me to get to the position I’m in right now, because in the work I do, programming is very involved, and art too, it goes hand in hand, it’s as an artist and programming,” Hernández says in an interview with CNN. Although her studies have been essential in her career, there are two other elements that were key in Ivel’s path to Dune: Canada and Pokémon. These are the Mexicans nominated for the Oscars 0:45Before Dune: the arrival from Mexico to Canada At the end of 2016, Ivel was about to graduate in Animation and Digital Art at CDMX. At that time, one of his most beloved undergraduate professors, Ángel Villaseñor, was working in Canada and sent his former students a call from the Moving Picture Company (MPC), the company where he worked and which is widely recognized in the audiovisual industry for its performance in effects and animation. The call consisted of recruitment sessions by MPC in Mexico and other countries for the MPC Academy program, which is aimed at “recent graduates and junior visual effects artists who wish to work in the visual effects industry.” Nobody paid attention to Villaseñor’s call, says Ivel, except her. In October 2016, she went to recruitment even with no previous experience in a visual effects job. “They (MPC) went to recruit people from different parts of the world and Mexico was one. So I went to apply, I went to my interview. I feel that it went very badly for me, I was very inexperienced, I had never worked at that time, my reel was not up to the level at all. I kind of said to myself ‘they’re not going to call me,’” she recalls. However, she did receive a response. In December of that year, he received an email telling him that he had not yet entered the MPC Academy, but that they gave him the opportunity to do a “pre-training”, which was an online course in which he had to deliver six projects in a month. MPC was going to qualify them and, if they met expectations, now they would go to the Academy. The end of the online course came in January 2017, at the same time that Ivel got a job in Mexico in a company that did 3D design and apps for pharmaceuticals. Her long-awaited response would come until the end of February, when she was accepted into MPC Academy, which meant she would be off to Canada to start in May. “It took a long time. I thought that, with the projects that I delivered, there would surely be disappointment. But no, rather it was just a matter of time. They got my work visa and even paid for my plane ticket,” says Hernández. The first eight films Ivel took less than a month to set up in Vancouver, Canada. She arrived in April and her first day at MPC Academy was May 1, 2017. “I started with a three-month training that was very difficult, we were six people and only three passed,” she says. After those three months, the “training” stage is over. MPC Vancouver contracted Ivel to work there permanently for one year. In the end, there was an extension for another 12 months, so his time at MPC was from 2017 to 2019. In that time, Hernandez worked on visual effects for eight movies: Justice League A Wrinkle in Time The New Mutants The Darkest Minds Skyscraper Ad Astra Detective Pikachu Sonic the Hedgehog Maleficent: Mistress of Evil After MPC, “I moved to a video game company. Gears Tactics is called the video game I’ve been working on” for the company Waterproof Studios, says Ivel. Gears Tactics took the rest of 2019. Already in 2020 and in the midst of a pandemic, Dune arrived. Detective Pikachu, the project that brought her to Dune Like many children of the 1990s, Ivel was surrounded in her childhood by Japanese cartoons. “Dragon Ball (was one of my favorites). Sakura Card Captor I also liked very much. I really liked Ranma ½ and Pokémon. Charmander was my favourite,” she recounts. Without knowing it in those years, the anime she watched as a child would take her to DNEG, one of the companies that did the special effects in Dune. “I was working at the video game company doing Gears Tactics, I was going to finish the project and I didn’t want to lose my job. I applied to several companies and DNEG answered me almost immediately. They call me, I have the interview and basically the following week they tell me ‘We’re going to give you a contract for a certain period of time until the project is finished,’” says Ivel. She still did not know that this project was Dune, but she already had a job and she got it in the midst of a pandemic that hit the labor sector hard. In fact, covid-19 was guilty of delaying the premiere of Dune, moving from December 18, 2020 to October 1, 2021. “So, I start working on DNEG. They give us one week of training and the next week they tell us ‘You’re going to be working on Dune.’ And I was like ‘Oh, what a father!’, I mean, I didn’t think they were going to give me this much of a project”, mentions Ivel. One day, already working hard on the Warner Bros. movie, the supervisor came to check what Ivel was wearing, an activity that was done daily to confirm that everything was going properly. “A normal day the supervisor comes to do the rounds, because every day he goes to see your computer or check how you are doing. He arrives and tells me ‘I have an effect for you because we saw it on your demo reel, that’s exactly why we hired you’, and I was like ‘How?’ And he plays me the demo reel and says ‘I want you to do something like that’. He was pointing out to me what I had done in Detective Pikachu. I felt very cool because it is because of this project that they consider me to work here, and well, that feels good, that you did well in another project and they already take you into consideration, ”she details. “The queen of smoke” The visual effect that caught the attention of Detective Pikachu to do it in Dune was that of “volumes”, which in a nutshell was smog or fumes, explains Ivel. “Detective Pikachu was a movie full of smoke. There was fuming all over the place, and that was basically what they were asking me for in Dune as well. In fact, when I left the first company (MPC), it was like ‘Oh, the queen of smokes’ because I had all the smokes, they let me do all of them”, he mentions. Because of these smoke effects, he worked on explosion scenes in Dune. Perhaps the best known, and the one that Ivel recalls in an interview, is the attack on the planet Arrakis by the Harkonnens and the Emperor’s Sardaukar troops against the Atreides. “I had explosions. I don’t know if you can place the part where everyone is running out of this giant place that looks like an airport, when it’s the first attack and the explosions start,” he points out. In the official trailer of the film that we leave you below, you can see some of the explosions and smoke that Ivel worked on. Hernandez also worked on scenes where the helicopter-like craft put out smoke as they flew, or the scene where Baron Harkonnen is in a bathtub naked and there’s smoke. Only in the visual effects that the department where Ivel was (the one of VFX, letters that in English refer to “visual effects”) did, it took about six months. Later, they passed their work to another department in the visual effects category (the “lightning” department, in charge of lighting the scene), which also took six months, Hernández estimates. Precisely in the “lightning” department another Mexican worked: Ángel Villaseñor, her university professor who helped her get to Canada. And, just like him, he says that there were more Mexicans participating in the effects of Dune. “Miguel Ortiz and Carlos Guzmán (they are two Mexicans who worked on Dune). There are more in other departments, but the ones I know are the two of them,” recalls Ivel. According to IMDb, Carlos Guzmán and Miguel Ortiz were part of the DNEG team that worked in the VFX department. “Detective Pikachu, the one I enjoyed the most” After finishing the Dune project at the end of 2020, Ivel put the smoke aside to focus more on animation, since his current job at the WildBrain company demands it. “Right now in the company where I’ve been working (WildBrain), we made a Netflix series called Go, Dog, Go! which is about dogs, it’s for children. Then also LEGO Friends. And I’m currently working on the animated series of Sonic, which is also coming out on Netflix, is called Sonic Prime,” he says. With all these projects in her work experience, however, Detective Pikachu remains her favorite, even above Dune. “Dune is definitely a great project, but I particularly liked Detective Pikachu the most and it was the one I enjoyed the most for a lot of things. I grew up with Pokémon to begin with, and working on something that has to do with that for me was ‘Wow! !’ Also, by then, I was a junior in the company (MPC), I was the lowest rank and I was learning. So when we went to Detective Pikachu, they gave me a lot more openness to do things, I felt the jump of learning and, in addition to everything, the effects they gave me were very, very funny, and well, I learned a lot with them”, concludes Ivel Hernández.