Ubisoft is set to open an animated movie studio in Montreal. The opening will be helped along by a grant from the Canadian government.

Ubisoft's Montreal based studio will receive C$8 million (£3.5 million) from the government towards the project. The figure, while not announced by Ubisoft, is reported in Quebecois broadsheet La Presse. The government's support is aimed at driving up employment levels. Ubisoft has said that by 2013 it will employ 500 specialists at the new CGI studio.

The studio will be the first of its kind in Montreal and will, at least initially, focus on short films derived from Ubisoft's games. The first will be an eight-minute short based on Assassin's Creed.

The CGI studio is part of a larger project that will see Ubisoft creating a further 500 jobs in its games studios in Montreal.

Yves Guillemot, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Ubisoft said:

"With this announcement, we are one step closer to reaching our goal of making Ubisoft's Montreal studio the most important center for video game development in the world, and especially to reinforce Quebec's position as a reference in the creation of digital entertainment."

That seems a tad ambitious to SPOnG, but it does seem difficult to argue with the country that brought us Napoleon Dynamite.

This isn't the first time Ubisoft has received a grant from the Canadian government. In 2005 it received a $4.3 million (£2.2 million) grant to set up the 'Ubisoft Campus', a facility for training future developers.