After 15 years of churning out ogres, spaceships, ninjas and the occasional ultra-seductive vixen, Montreal's NAD Centre can't keep up with demand.

But with the growing sophistication of video games, the city's premier 3-D animation school is growing out of its young britches.

"Our graduates need to develop games that are more intelligent, that aren't just targeted to the usual 25-year-old male," said the centre's general manager, Suzanne Guevremont.

Graduates of the centre, whose creatures can be seen on ads in the metro, today work for Hollywood studios and game publishers the world over. Their craft has been seen in Shrek, Lord of the Rings and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The school, which churns out 90 graduates a year, hopes to bump that to 120 in two years.

Applicants need at the minimum a college degree and a serious artistic bent with a large portfolio to prove it.

Yet a flair for making jazzy sprites is no longer sufficient, as gamers mature and demand more urbane titles.

"We need to recruit students who also have a good knowledge of history and culture," Guevremont said.

Its history began in the mid-1990s, when movies like Terminator II: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park pushed 3-D graphics to the mainstream. CEGEP Jonquiere, which had a strong media program, opened a Montreal school to train 3-D artists for film and called it the Centre national d'animation et de design.

The technology quickly bled into video games, with Tomb Raider being among the first to exploit three-dimensional gameplay. So in 1997, the NAD Centre offered the first program in Canada for creating computer-generated graphics for video games.

The non-stop evolution of games doesn't allow the centre's program directors to rest. At the school's conference table, producers and developers of competing game studios sit together to update NAD on the market's changing needs.

"We never offered the same program twice in a row," Guevremont noted.

To be able to quickly change its program, the school cut its ties in 1995 with the provincial Education Department, as government bureaucracy dragged down changes to curricula. While a ministerial seal of approval normally gives schools more weight, NAD's 15 years in the business gives it enough cred of its own.

If it didn't, students wouldn't come from Switzerland, the U.S. and China, and pay the $21,000 tuition for foreign students. Canadians pay $16,500.

"Here's the most fascinating part of this industry," Guevremont muses. "It's one of the few out there where you see artists who make a decent living."