Montreal’s booming visual-effects industry attracts talent from all over the world. But it also gave one visual-effects producer the chance to return to her hometown to work in the business she loves. Chloe Grysole, who grew up in St-Lambert on the South Shore, moved to London in 2008 to pursue her career in the special-effects biz, plying her high-tech trade on movies like the Harry Potter flicks and Skyfall. Then she returned to Montreal in 2013 to work as senior visual-effects producer on the Tom Cruise sci-fi film Edge of Tomorrow, working with the British studio Framestore, which had just set up shop here. “I wanted to come back and when Framestore decided to open a studio in Montreal, it kind of made it a no-brainer,” said Grysole in a phone interview this week from her Framestore office in Mile End. “It was like — ‘I can live at home and still do the level of work I was doing in London, which is of course world class.’ So that was really appealing to me.” After Edge of Tomorrow, she went to set up the Montreal studio for Cinesite, a visual-effects and animation company. She was the general manager of Cinesite Montreal for a couple of years. After that, the opportunity came up at Framestore and in April, Grysole was hired as managing director of Framestore’s Montreal studio. And she couldn’t be happier. She’s back in the city where she grew up and she’s heading a studio that’s going gangbusters. Framestore now has nearly 600 employees here — they’re virtually always hiring new personnel — and it’s currently at work producing visual effects for a slew of major films, including Mary Poppins Returns, Welcome to Marwen, Captain Marvel, Dumbo, and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. Framestore also did extensive visual effects work on Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the Harry Potter prequel that opens Nov. 16. The Framestore art department worked to help create more than 100 beasts for the film. Framestore’s Montreal operation received a major boost earlier this year when its contribution to Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 helped the film win the Academy Award for best visual effects. “That was a huge deal for us,” said Grysole. “Winning an Academy Award is a career changer and it’s wonderful. But it was also a stamp of approval for the Montreal location (of Framestore) because it was the first project that Montreal did completely on its own as a team. “All the work that Framestore did on Blade Runner was done in the Montreal office whereas before we were doing a lot of shows that were split with London. It gives a lot of credibility to the work that the team does here in this location and it definitely gives you an in with certain clients. It gives us visibility that we might not have had before.” There were some local companies before, Grysole said, “but it was a much more boutique environment at the time. Montreal has always been very innovative in the software-development front for the industry. This is way back in the day but Softimage was from here, Discreet Logic was from here. So a lot of the software that people coming up the ranks were using was actually (created) here.

It gives us visibility that we might not have had before.

But, “often enough, if they wanted to have a certain level of career, they’d have to go and live anywhere else in the world.” “But there wasn’t really a big enough industry in Montreal to allow the studios to send big chunks of work and to produce their shows here. With Framestore, they were looking at various Canadian cities to expand into ( because of ) the Canadian and provincial tax credits. For them it was — ‘Where is the most untapped talent? Where is the innovation happening?’ And the answer was Montreal.” It also helps that people from everywhere love the idea of living and working in Montreal. “Because it’s a global industry, you’re going to have to find the best talent all over the world,” said Grysole. “You’re going to find a lot of people locally. But 50 per cent of our talent is from anywhere else in the world. So you need to find a place that people are going to want to relocate to. And the reality is Montreal is very rich culturally. Also it has easy access, with direct flights to the U.K. And the quality of living is really high. It’s affordable living in Quebec. So it’s really appealing for people to come live here. It’s also brought a lot of people back. I’m an example of that. I’m back in Montreal after having lived and worked abroad.”