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Latest Work:

* Coraline (2009) – Henry Selick
* Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) – Gore Verbinski
* The Nativity Story (2006) – Catherine Hardwicke
* Superman Returns (2006) – Bryan Singer
* Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006) – Tim Hill

Veronica Hernandez grew up in southern California and has been an artist ever since she can remember. Her parents felt like they couldn’t buy her enough paper to draw on since she would draw on everything that had empty space on it, such as inside her book covers and even inside her lampshades. Although she wanted to ultimately be an artist, she ended up with a college degree in Cultural Anthropology.

Fast forward many years later, her then husband who worked in the scanning and recording at a Pacific Title in Hollywood, encouraged Veronica to become a digital artist. He taught her basic unix and another artist friend offered to teach her Matador after hours. She already knew photoshop and how to paint on a wacom at home, so while taking advantage of learning from her artist friends, she was offered a job as a dustbuster. Veronica was super excited and although she knew it was a very entry level position, she swore she would be “the best dustbuster ever!” Her first film credit was doing restoration for the original Fantasia, where she would enthusiastically sign her emails to other artists with, “Thank you for choosing Veronica for all your dustbusting needs”.

Her painting experience flourished and soon she was removing all sorts of wires, rigs, people, blood, guns – you name it. She was determined to get to a point where she could remove anything and do it fast for the demanding schedule that movie trailers posses. She shortly moved up in rank as a  lead painter and decided to ventured over to other studios to gain more experience and quench her thirst for more challenging projects. Her first stop was at Rhythm and Hues Studios, where for several years she explored being a bg prep artist, while learning more compositing techniques and getting the chance to do digital matte paintings/set extensions. Some of her credits at R&H include Daredevil, XMen 2, Garfield 1 and 2, Superman Returns and the Academy Award nominated film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

After Narnia, Veronica decided she wanted a change of scenery and headed over to Digital Domain to work on The Nativity Story, then CIS Hollywood for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and most recently Laika, for Henry Selick’s upcoming film, Coraline.

Although Veronica has expanded her compositing skills over the years, she has decided to remain in the paint department, for the simple fact that she loves it. She loves the organic feeling of painting and the challenge of being able to tackle shots not very many people can do, the rare type of frame by frame painting that only a few out there can master.

Having only experienced live action or live action mixed with CG – signing on to work on a stop motion movie like Coraline was unusual and truly a privilege to be part of the team. Working on a film shot in stereoscopic was not only a new experience for her, but being surrounded by artists who were also excited about the film, made the crew even more focused on making it the beautiful film that it is.

Veronica recently took some time off after Coraline to decompress and enjoy some personal time with her dog, Cookie. She looks forward to moving to Connecticut soon to work at Blue Sky Studios as a stereoscopic finishing compositor on Ice Age 3.

Veronica’s thoughts on production:

I truly enjoy working as part of a big creative team and process.  It’s always a blast to meet and work with new artists with such diverse backgrounds in schooling and creatively. I find that most people usually have side projects like bands, artwork or their own animated short.  I’ve met the most amazing, talented and creative people in this business!

It’s a difficult field and working 10-12 hour days in a dark room staring at noodlely things on your monitor,  can get things go silly and wacky sometimes.  People get stir crazy and we usually end up entertaining ourselves with sing-a-longs, nerf gun fights and general tomfoolery!  Things can get stressful and tiring at the end of production, you’re never home, and generally artists get burned out.

I always find myself thinking: “why do I live like this?”
Then, you have time off, the movie comes out and people tell you how cool the movie is.

That’s when you realize you got to be a part of the creative team that made a cool movie – and in some cases a magical piece of art – and it always ends up being worth it!

Veronica’s Links:

• Portfolio
• Veronica’s IMDB
• Coraline

Veronica’s Demo Reel: (click play)