Ivel Hernández’s work led to her collaborating on the science fiction film Dune.
Night on the desert planet Arrakis was interrupted when its sand reflected the color of explosions from an aerial attack, while smoke billowed over its dunes.
This is one of the scenes worked on by a Mexican animator who is a Tec de Monterrey graduate in Dune, a film that took home 6 Oscars, including Best Visual Effects.
“I never thought I’d work on this. At the end, it feels good to see your work, especially in a film like Dune,” says Ivel Hernández, a Digital Art and Animation graduate from the Mexico City campus.
Ivel overcame the challenges that came her way, such as obtaining a scholarship to study at the Tec or filling one of 3 vacancies to become a digital animator in Canada, despite having financial difficulties.
Dozens of hours animating video games such as Gears of War and movies such as Detective Pikachu would lead Ivel to “landing” on Planet Arrakis, in the film that won 6 Academy Awards.
“Lie a little”: bombing the dunes of Arrakis
Ivel explains that “bombing” a planet isn’t easy, even if it’s done through a computer and using only animation and special effects.
Explosions take a lot of work, she explains, since simulating them as they’d happen in real life would give a dazzling result and make viewers miss many details.
That’s where her job comes in. “Lie a little,” she says with a laugh.
Ivel was on the digital animation team that gave the explosions the look requested by international director Denis Villeneuve’s team.
“There’s a scene where some ships arrive to attack planet Arrakis. The explosions begin, and people are running along a large esplanade.
“During those scenes in Dune, we created smoke and things that have to do with volume, so they’d look like real explosions without losing the details,” she says.
The challenge of simulating explosions on a distant planet
Ivel explains that she worked on the film 2 years before its release, even before the pandemic. She points out that, even though it was a job she enjoyed, there were very challenging moments due to the complexity of the animations.
“There were scenes where certain effects got in the way, so to speak. Sometimes the client wants an effect like an explosion to happen, but without it taking up the entire screen.
“Explosions are huge, so when you do them, they can be very startling and you have to minimize a lot of things,” says Ivel.
“I never thought I’d work on this. At the end, it feels good to see your work, especially in a film like Dune.”
In that sequence alone, the Mexican animator says it took more than a month to achieve a real-life appearance and make the details occurring around a bombing that took place in the dark of night stand out.
Ivel first had to picture the explosions in her mind to generate the smoke, make sense of it, and then portray that in a computer using software known as Houdini.
“Basically, your brain has to imagine it as if it were reality. Then, you have to generate that spark or fuel in the software and see how it’s going to detonate.
“In the end, you send your explosion to a department that lights your scene. We work with the animation and lighting departments and then they take charge of putting everything together,” says Ivel.
Seeing the result of 2 years of work
The Mexican animator says that despite having worked on more than a dozen films, she doesn’t usually go to the theater to watch the final result, as she already knows how the stories end.
With Dune, it was different. She went with her partner, and throughout the movie, she was looking for any mistakes in the special effects that she and the team had worked on 2 years earlier.
She laughs when she says she feels that she didn’t find any.
“There are movies in which you see some very computerized effects, but I don’t feel like that happened in Dune. The effects were very good. I didn’t feel that there were any failed effects. I’m thrilled to know that it’s now nominated for an Oscar,” she says.
Dune won the Oscar for Best Original Score; Best Sound; Best Cinematography; Best Film Editing; Best Production Design; and Best Visual Effects.
From dreaming of becoming a veterinarian to her love for video games
Before she helped bomb Dune, before she arrived in Canada, even before she studied Digital Art and Animation and the Tec, Ivel never imagined that animation would become her career.
In fact, when Ivel was little, she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian.
Everything would change in high school, when she sat down in front of a computer and started using Photoshop or other web design and animation programs.
Her new interest was joined by a love for video games, so she began to consider animation as a career that would bring her closer to creating those stories she enjoyed playing so much.
That would be the beginning of Ivel’s career, but also the beginning of what she remembers as the greatest challenges of her life.
How studying at the Tec led her to Canada
Ivel was determined to study at Tec de Monterrey, despite the fact that her family couldn’t fully support her financially.
In order to do so, she had to get a loan, so she got a 90% scholarship that she would try to pay off herself later on when she was working.
Semesters passed, projects and experiences were accumulated, while Ivel reached the final 6 months of her degree with a new opportunity and another challenge.
“I focused on doing my multidisciplinary project. It’s supposed to be something you work on for your demo reel (a video portfolio of your skills), and I focused on video games.
“Then, a professor who had taught me and moved to Montreal contacted us. He told us that the company where he worked would be recruiting and that they’d be visiting Mexico and other countries,” she says.
That was her first call of destiny to Canadian soil.
Difficult times in Vancouver
Ivel had already worked to pay for a course focused on video games at Vancouver Film School, where she had her first encounter with Canada, but thanks to that professor, Ivel could turn that course into the rest of her life.
“I made a reel to apply to the special effects area. With that, they gave me an opportunity for an online course,” recalls Ivel.
The online course was preparatory training for a recruitment process in which they would choose 6 people from all over the world in the first stage, after which they would choose only 3 to work with: Ivel was one of them.
The company took care of paying for her work permit for Vancouver. They even gave her 2 weeks in a hotel but receiving the salary of an animator-in-training meant the financial pressure hit the roof.
“The problem came once the 2 weeks were over. The pay was better than any job in Mexico, at least in my profession, but rent in Vancouver is extremely expensive.
“I was in a difficult situation. I had a lot of awful problems. Financially speaking, it was bad, because I also had to pay off my student loan,” she remembers.
“I had borrowed money to get to Vancouver and I was in the red. At that point, I’d had enough. I distanced myself from everything. I put it all out of my mind and I thought: ‘I’m going to focus on myself.’ I had nothing to lose.”
Her resilience made her carry on with the process in the hope of being selected.
“I had borrowed money to get to Vancouver and I was in the red. At that point, I’d had enough. I distanced myself from everything. I put it all out of my mind and I thought: ‘I’m going to focus on myself.’ I had nothing to lose.”
Animation makes her keep learning
Ivel received the long-awaited message: she was one of the chosen ones. She’d earned a place by learning more and more on her own, like when she used to sit down to use Photoshop in high school.
“Math was never difficult for me, but I wasn’t a genius. I got here, and I had to mix it with programming and physics. Even to this day, I have trouble with it. It’s been a challenge to study constantly,” says Hernández.
Canada was now her home. After a search through several neighborhoods, she managed to find a place to live that was affordable and to her liking.
Opening the door, she walked in with her suitcases on her shoulders. She dropped them to the floor and would later sit next to them staring at an empty apartment, but at the same time, it was a place she could fill with her dreams for the future.
Sharing advice on her social networks
Ivel was on the animation team for the Gears Tactics video game, from the Gears of War series for Microsoft XBox, something that she treasures and talks about with a smile.
From animating earth into the air through explosions, spreading fire, and even smoke that turns people into Pokémon, Ivel has created special effects for projects that bring her ever closer to her dream of creating video games.
In the meantime, she smiles as she tells her story, which she occasionally shares on her TikTok account, where she gives advice to those wanting to follow in her footsteps.
She also continues playing as she used to do, after venturing onto the Twitch platform to stream video games.
“I’d like to go for video game animation. That’d be the next step in my career, and I know that I can do it better now.
“There aren’t always opportunities in Mexico, and I know that a lot of people have the same dream as me. The advice I give is what I would’ve liked to have been given,” she says laughing.
“I’m not really interested in people remembering me for what I’ve done, what I want to do is help people.”
Dune is a science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve about an interstellar war that takes place on planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. It’s based on the 1965 novel of the same name by author Frank Herbert.
The film was released in September 2021 and had a budget of 165 million dollars. After its success at the box office, part 2 was announced, which is expected to be released in October 2023.
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