Like many scrappy creative ventures, Montreal-based visual effects house Rodeo FX started in a basement. The year was 2006. The company’s co-founder, Sébastien Moreau, had just returned to Canada after working at two of the top visual effects companies in the world: Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX and George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. He and co-founder Mathieu Raynaut were set on building their own thing, a studio capable of competing in the same league as their former employers. 

Since the studio’s founding, the demand for visual effects by movie studios has grown exponentially with no visible end in sight. By 2034, the visual effects industry’s worth is projected to double from nearly US$30 billion this year to US$60 billion. But visual effects is also a constantly-evolving sector, one where yearly technological developments can render companies irrelevant very quickly. 

Rodeo’s co-founders started with only four employees, but by 2010 Rodeo had grown into a bustling business with 35 employees. A steady stream of customers came through the door, looking for one of two main offerings: matte painting, in which artists create realistic backgrounds for movies or TV shows, and compositing, which combines live-action footage with computer-generated imagery to make a single image. But Rodeo wanted to be a one-stop shop, proficient in a wide range of visual effects work. They brought on Jordan Soles as director of research and development and tasked him with the company’s next phase.

“For a company that was known for doing two things really well, to now do everything really well – I knew it was going to be a long journey,” says Soles, who is now the company’s vice president of technology and development. 

Back in 2010—when films like Avatar and Inception were pushing the boundaries of 3D motion capture and digitally made cityscapes respectively—Rodeo began expanding its own computer graphics capabilities. Despite initially only comprising a small part of Rodeo FX’s business, the expansion required them to build out a whole new department. They made a significant investment in advanced computer software to integrate more cutting-edge computer graphics into the worlds they were building. 

The transition wasn’t without big risks or bumps in the road, says Soles. Rodeo had to learn how to efficiently store, manage and access the data that formed the basis of their newly generated graphics. They had to balance how to increase their rendering power (by upgrading their hardware) with keeping their server rooms cool—all things that weren’t their expertise at the time. But Soles says it allowed them to take on the projects and risks necessary to stay relevant.

Rodeo FX was soon able to differentiate themselves from other studios and grow their reputation by mastering technically difficult “creature work”– the art of bringing to life convincing aliens, monsters, and animals. By the mid-2010s, Rodeo created the computer-generated hippos in The Legend of Tarzan, and soon, the big dogs came knocking. Throughout the mid-2010s, the studio became a go-to for the most popular show in the world, Game of Thrones. A slew of big time projects came after that: in 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the studio designed small, magical rodent-like creatures and herds of eight-limbed flying creatures. In Stranger Things, their crowning achievement took the form of the terrifying humanoid known as the Demogorgon, arguably Rodeo’s most recognizable animated creature to date.

Rodeo credits their ability to stay on top of the latest tech in part to their dedicated innovation team, led by Peter Nofz. The group exclusively tests and explores new tech outside of the main production pipeline, reporting back on what works and what doesn’t. If it’s a hit, Rodeo will integrate it into their process. “Anybody who got involved in this industry basically knew that they would need to learn for the rest of their life,” says Nofz. “Update your knowledge constantly. A company that doesn’t do that is in trouble.” 

Now, Rodeo’s team of 900 employees is known to studios, producers and directors as the firm to tap when they’ve got a difficult, complicated project with no clear solution, says Soles. For HBO’s sci-fi series Dune: Prophecy, Rodeo built the majestic Imperial Palace and its massive surroundings, including lush gardens overlooking a vast ocean, in painstaking detail in nearly 50,000 frames. In another recent release, Rodeo animated the speedy hedgehog himself in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, along with his sidekicks. The animation demanded a highly specific level of quality, from the size of their heads to the placement of their eyes, and even their pupil size.

But today, the visual effects industry is in the midst of another major industrial revolution: artificial intelligence. For chief technology officer Martin Walker, it’s not a thing to fear, as it frees up their artists to flex their creative muscles on more interesting tasks. Take rotoscoping, for example, an important part of compositing. Animators would digitally cut out a character from its green screen background, frame-by-frame. It’s a time consuming and somewhat mindless century-old technique that was ripe for innovation. Creative houses already outsourced that work to Asia or India, where animators would cut out characters and send back the data. Now, a generative AI algorithm specifically trained on rotoscoping can do it – quickly. Rodeo’s advertising division, a small team with short timelines, is also trying out AI methods to speed up their process and create multiple iterations for clients. 

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On set, the FX team has used AI to create concepts for producers and directors on the fly, rather than go back and forth for weeks or months–what Walker calls “the fuzzy front end.” Recently, the VFX supervisor was able to whip out his laptop on set and–within a half day–made a compelling rendered concept with a mix of AI and Photoshop. “The producer said, wow, that’s exactly what we want,” Walker said. 

As AI tech continues to disrupt the industry, Rodeo is embracing it. The team expects new generative AI algorithms to come into the space within the next 12 months. “It’s changing at the speed of light,” Walker said. But Rodeo is ready for it.