Montreal: Canada Economic Development has announced a $9-million grant to Behaviour Communications’ soon-to-be-launched digital production facility, Behaviour Studio.

The federal funding represents about a third of the $28 million Behaviour Studio plans to spend on state-of-the-art computer equipment over three years, says the studio’s gm, Francois Garcia.

Garcia says the studio will be ‘the first of its kind’ in Canada and is being designed to meet all fcc dtv digital broadcast standards including hdtv.

Behaviour intends to position the studio as ‘the Canadian animation and special effects leader’ for the film, animation and multimedia entertainment industries. The studio is slated to open at the end of November.

Behaviour is hiring.

‘We’re looking for people with film experience in computer graphics and that’s a really important part of our operations,’ says Garcia. ‘We’re also looking for people with compositing experience for special effects.’

Operations will be rolled out in two separate phases over the next two years.

Initial services include project evaluation, visual creation, cgi content production, character design and integration, special-effects design and supervision, digital post-production for film, high-resolution and hd video including editing and compositing on Inferno, Fire hd and Flint, 2D and 3D graphics, and editorial services

‘We also have 10 computer graphics workstations and we’ll be running Maya and Softimage, amongst quite a few other softwares,’ he says.

Longer-term capital acquisitions include the building of a large state-of-the-art (blue box) motion-control and motion-capture production studio with smart lighting grid and multiformat capability including hd production for film, ‘so that is where a lot of the money will go,’ says Garcia.

Behaviour Studio will compete in the international film and high-end commercial market.

‘We’re setting up to work in high-definition because we believe using hd as an acquisition medium has certain strengths, even if the product is ultimately downsized to a 525 format,’ explains Garcia. ‘We also intend to work on bringing hd pictures back to film, as in mixed media and the creation of new content.’

Other hardware acquisitions, including digital film transfer units, will depend on local market developments.

‘I’m waiting to see who will jump in,’ says Garcia, ‘because right now in Montreal there is a lack of state-of-the-art film transfer. Sony and Rank Cintel are coming out with new kinds of [transfer] technology and Command Post in Toronto has a Spirit, but there are no Spirits in Montreal.

‘We’ll be competing in the visual effects [sector], but what we want to do is to lure work that would have been done elsewhere and bring it to Montreal, and we believe this will mean [additional revenues] for other local facilities,’ he says.

Management includes Valerie Delahaye, head of cg. Her experience includes work on Titantic and The Fifth Element at Digital Domain in l.a. Stephane Landry, formerly of Buzz, is director of digital effects.

Garcia says Behaviour has cross-platform design capabilities, including print and the Internet.

Garcia, former gm at Supersuite, says staff will grow from the current nine to about 75 people over the three-year implementation period.