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Meet the Montreal team that helped bring ‘Captain Marvel’ to life

Click to play video: 'Montreal women helped bring Captain Marvel to light'
Montreal women helped bring Captain Marvel to light
WATCH: A popular movie featuring a female lead had a bit of help from Montreal talent. – Mar 26, 2019

Brie Larson is unstoppable as Captain Marvel, but the first woman to lead a Marvel superhero movie could have never saved an entire civilization without one team of Montreal superwomen.

“It’s about time, in my opinion, and it’s nice to see a woman taking the helm, kicking butt and taking names,” said Patricia Leblanc, a visual effects line producer with Framestore Montreal.

A key part of Captain Marvel‘s visual effects was made at Framestore Montreal in the city’s Mile End area.

“We had this big sequence and we were the masters of that sequence,” said Leblanc.

“It has spaceships, space, aliens — who doesn’t want to be working on that?” said Sophie Carroll, a visual effects producer at Framestore.

READ MORE: ‘Avengers: Endgame’ trailer — Captain Marvel joins the team of superheroes

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The Montreal crew created a scene revealing the intricate alien world of Torfa.

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“We established this alien planet and the big story point of the ongoing war between the Skrulls and the Kree,” said Framestore visual effects supervisor Christian Kaestner. “For those five minutes of the movie, we had about 10 months to do it and a total of 160 people working on the project.”

Though the team was not only made up of women, Framestore took the opportunity to put out a video emphasizing some of its own female superheroes who worked on the film.

“The finished product emphasizes that there is no difference, and women can be superheroes, too, which is a nice reflection of where we are in society now,” said Carroll.

Captain Marvel was also the first Marvel movie that Framestore Montreal did without any outside help. The Montreal division of the international company has gained new prominence since it won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects last year for its work on Blade Runner 2049.

READ MORE: Montreal special effects company wins Oscar for Blade Runner 2049

“Obviously, with the Academy Award comes a lot of trust,” said Kaestner.

Marvel has hired the company to work on the next Avengers movie, and the team is also working on other blockbusters that are too secret to discuss.

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Will they feature men? Women?

The hope is that soon it won’t matter either way.

“It’ll happen soon that it won’t be such an abnormal thing to see a woman at the head of a superhero movie. It’ll just be a habitual thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a woman or a man, you can still kick butt,” said Leblanc.

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