Meteor Studios

The company was co-founded in January 2001 by director Pierre De Lespinois, who was based in Los Angeles, California, and Discovery Communications, based in Bethesda, Maryland. De Lespinois, who had created the HDTV series, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, became president of Meteor Studios, while continuing to run Evergreen Films, his HD live-action company. In the early years, he travelled to Montreal once a month but otherwise worked with the Meteor team remotely.

The initial impetus was to provide a steady supply of cost-effective computer graphics for scientific programming on the Discovery Channel. Meteor Studios built CG libraries of dinosaurs, ancient architecture, and weather phenomena, to create visual effects which had proven popular in movies, for television. By 2005, the company had become the largest visual effects studio in eastern Canada, with many major film projects such as Fantastic Four, in addition to work for TV.

Meteor also saved on costs by using "previsualization" tools to produce test composites in the field after each shot. Rather than waiting until post-production to see how the computer-generated and drawn elements worked together with the actual background and actors, the director was able to assess immediately whether the desired shots had been captured or not, thereby minimizing film crew costs.

The main office was housed in the old Northern Electric Building in Pointe St. Charles near the Lachine Canal in southwestern Montreal, Canada. As of July 2005, The Gazette in Montreal reported that there was a core group of 80 employees at Meteor Studios, but that projects such as Fantastic Four had involved "140 artists working at 'full tilt'". Key employees included head of production François Garcia, and visual effects supervisors Paul Nightingale and Bret St. Clair.