The final episode of the most recent season of Game of Thrones ends with a dragon destroying a location that has played a major role in the plot of the popular TV show.

Behind the scenes, making the destruction look real, was Montreal-based Rodeo FX.

The company has been working on visual effects for Game of Thrones for four years — creating and destroying cities; making dragons breathe fire and oceans boil; and bringing thousands of extras to life through digital effects. For three years in a row, it’s won Emmy Awards for its work on the show.

While Game of Thrones isn’t in the running for any Emmys this year — the seventh season premièred too late in the year — Rodeo FX is nominated for its work on another show, Black Sails.

“Visual effects are becoming more and more important in the film industry and TV industry, the budgets are growing,” said Sébastien Moreau, the company’s founder and president.

At any given time, the company is working on between six and 10 projects, many of them major Hollywood films. The studio recently spent two years working on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which came out in July. It also worked on an adaptation of Stephen King ’s It, which comes out in September, and the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, directed by Quebecer Denis Villeneuve.

Moreau got his start in the visual effects business working as an artist, first in Montreal and then in California, where he worked for Industrial Light and Magic, a visual effects company founded by George Lucas. In 2006, he came back to Montreal and started Rodeo FX.

At that time, the company was just three people in a basement.

Industrial Light and Magic was one of its first clients but, over the years, it’s built relationships, and a reputation, with studios, reducing the amount of work it does as subcontractor in favour of work it gets directly.

“In our industry, we say ‘we’re a

s good as our last project,’ so we always have to be better and better on every project,” Moreau said.

By the end of this year, Rodeo FX plans to employ 450 people. It’s opened offices in Quebec City and Los Angeles. An office in Munich, Germany is in the works.

Rodeo FX’s growth comes as the industry itself is growing in Montreal. Since 2009, Montreal’s visual effects industry has grown by 27 per cent a year, according to the Quebec Film and Television Council.

In 2016, it received around $278 million in contracts, spread across 187 projects. That growth sometimes makes hiring difficult. While Rodeo FX has hired most of its staff locally, Moreau said the company looks around the world for talent.

“We would love to hire as much as possible locally, but unfortunately, the schools are not producing enough students,” Moreau said.

While much of what Rodeo FX cr

eates comes straight out of the imagination, Jordan Soles, the company’s vice-president of development and technology, said it often looks to the real world for inspiration. To create creatures for the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the company ’s VFX artists created amalgamations of real animals.

“The reason that’s important is that allows us to start taking a look at videos of how they move or how they act and begin to start piecing together how to build something like that,” Soles said. “We do the same thing with effects, too.”

For a destruction scene in a recen

t episode of a popular TV show, the Rodeo FX team watched videos of icebergs breaking apart and created physical mock-ups.

“The references are really, really important to get,” Moreau said, “for the movement, for the lighting, for the photorealism, for everything.”

But it’s not just making things that don’t exist in the real world or that would be too expensive to film.

“There’s a lot of visual effects that people wouldn’t even know, they’re just truly invisible,” Soles said. “We know that we’ve achieved what we wanted to achieve when you’ve watched a scene and paid attention to the story and you didn’t pay attention to the fact that there’s literally nothing other than the two actors talking, that everything else doesn’t exist, it’s a giant green screen.”

Sometimes, the company may have to turn day int

o night or change the colour of the leaves in a scene that’s set in the spring but was filmed in the fall.

“We can do anything,” Moreau said. “We can make anything look real, there’s no limit to what we can do. The only limit, he said is “budget and time.”