El Ranchito: "We killed the Night King!"

At Gamereactor we love movies and series almost as much as video games, and as of late they've been converging much more to the common point that is how real-time graphics are used to render beautiful worlds and characters in both fields. We talked with El Ranchito's head of studio Manuel Ramírez at Gamelab 2023:

"We're around 20 years old. We are an old-school VFX facility", Ramírez introduces. "I mean we are really good at composition, we are really good at set extension, and eight or nine years ago we created a bigger effects department, bigger crowd department. So we are aiming to get better and bigger production and we are achieving it".

"We killed the Night King at the Ranchito, which was great", celebrates the studio head as one of the studio's main achievements for Hollywood, referring to all the visual work that went into creating some of the most memorable sequences in Game of Thrones."That's true. In fact I do think it's that show. It's like the ceiling of my career. I'm very happy with the work we did there".

In the interview we also talk about different tech and about job offers and the profiles and positions the studio needs to cover regularly. Besides, we discuss video game graphics vs visual effects for movies and series, how The Mandalorian's StageCraft / Volume changed everyone's workflow and what will be, according to Ramírez, the next big thing in VFX:

"Volumetric capture is going to change a lot of things in how the DigiDoubles are operated in VFX, not in game industry. I mean, volumetric capture is like the things you usually do with a camera that you try to photograph everything and then you obtain a 3D representation with a texture supply. It's the same but with video, basically. So you can record someone with video and then you have a 3D mesh with the texture apply as a sequence of images, and you can use that instead of building your entire character from the ground up. (...) And of course, I think real-time technology in the moment that I think we need a standard to communicate real-time technology and offline technology. USD [Universal Scene Description] could be like the Rosetta Stone for visual arts, but let's see".

Interestingly enough the studio is kind of coming full circle this year, as Ramírez acknowledges J. A Bayona's 2012 The Impossible as the title that put them in the map, when precisely Netflix's Society of the Snow by the same director has been El Ranchito's main project as of late and will release before the year's end.