When the FX miniseries “Shōgun” took home a record 18 Emmy Awards last month, its cast and crew of more than 1,000 celebrated across the world.

But only one of those Emmy winners could trace her career back to a movie theater in Seaside.

Melody Mead estimated she was 9 years old when she tagged along with her father, Mark, a civil engineer, as he worked on renovating the Cannes Cinema Center in Seaside. She remembers that day as a pull-back-the-curtain moment, especially when she glimpsed the theater’s projection booth.

“(It) started to reveal to me that there’s a whole world of production behind the scenes,” said Mead, who with “Shōgun” won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Visual Effects as the show’s associate visual effects producer.

Three decades before she was instrumental in bringing 16th-century Japan to life in pixels, Mead found other ways to explore that “whole world” in her North Coast youth.

She immersed herself in the special features DVDs of the “Star Wars” prequels and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. After graduating from Seaside High School, she studied English literature and film at the University of British Columbia, inadvertently landing in Vancouver’s hotbed visual effects industry.

Since the early 2010s, Mead has worked her way up the production ladder, starting as an uncredited visual effects coordinator on network shows such as “Once Upon a Time,” getting hired on massive blockbusters like “Captain America: Civil War,” and reaching new heights with “Shōgun,” where she managed the financial needs of a visually ambitious television show.

“I’d say probably half of my time is spent keeping track of the money and where it’s being spent, and that we’re spending it in the most efficient way, where we hit all our deadlines, but you still get good quality work out on the screen,” Mead said, describing her role.

She estimates the visual effects department alone had between 500 and 1,000 people — several of whom Mead hired.

The show contains epic Samurai battles and daring ocean rescues — largely powered by visual effects. Even in the less flashy shots, a character scarcely walks into a room in Shōgun without an incredibly considered visual effects-rendered backdrop of Osaka from five centuries ago.

And though most of Mead’s time was spent managing the creatives, her work in preproduction owes a lot to the imagination, as she sat with the visual effects supervisor reading the script to create a rough estimate of a budget.

“You have no visual reference at all of what it’s going to be. It’s just purely a script, and you have to estimate what you think that’s going to take based on what information you have at that time.”

Once principal photography begins, her job is a paradox — that of the careful planner who’s also the consummate improviser. That duality maybe owes a little something to the right-brain and left-brain tendencies of her piano-teacher mother Kathy and engineer father Mark, who both still reside in Warrenton, where Melody grew up.

“I will generally have a live feed of sets, so I can watch it for my office as I’m furiously updating my budgets in Excel. Then I’ll look over my shoulder and be like, ‘Oh no, there’s a person in the background on that shot, and the director really liked that take, so I guess we’re painting someone out of the background. Add that to the budgets.”

Mead’s colleague, Kel Zhu, who worked alongside her as a visual effects coordinator on “Shōgun,” said Mead excels at communicating in a high-stress, deadline-fueled environment and also existing calmly within it.

“Once I had to sit through a very long session to take notes,” Zhu remembered. “Melody would open the meeting room door with a small gap and slide in soda water, snacks and energy bars every few hours. It’s pretty funny when you are stressed and tired, but suddenly see your door open by itself and a hand brings in all kinds of snacks one by one.”

As for the Emmy Awards themselves, Mead describes the September ceremony as a “blur” — a lot of hurry up and wait, and then figuring out how to get the trophy home. Turns out the answer is to carry it on the plane in an otherwise empty backpack. Los Angeles airport security is used to seeing them, Mead speculates. Currently, the gold statue resides on her desk.

“I’ll probably get a glass IKEA cabinet or something,” she said. “I definitely did not plan for it to be coming back with me.”