London-headquartered VFX house Cinesite officially launched its #animation division on Monday with the announcement of a new 54,000 square-foot animation studio in downtown Montréal. With plans to come online over the next 18 months, the new facility -- able to scale up to a total of 750 staff and crew -- will allow the Cinesite visual effects team to effectively double in size, with the entire sixth floor to be made available in 2017 to meet the demand of the company’s steadily increasing feature animation work.

The new digs were made possible with a loan of $2.4 million from Investissement Quebec on behalf of the Government of Quebec to support the creation of infrastructure to allow feature animation production. An additional loan guarantee of $19.6 million towards an overall budget of at least $90 million is also being advanced to the production company to help with the financing of each of the first three animated films on the studio’s slate. Six more films are planned to follow the initial three features, which will see the facility at full capacity with more than 500 new permanent jobs by 2020.

The co-creator of Illumination Entertainment’s Despicable Me franchise, Pablos’ career includes credits as supervising animator for #Disney titles including Tarzan, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules and Treasure Planet, just to name a few. Pablos’ work has led him to be nominated twice to the Annie Awards for his character design work on Blue Sky’s Rio and for his character animation on Disney’s Treasure Planet.

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