Agents of SHIELD: VFX Team Teases Massive Series Finale

After seven seasons on ABC, Marvel Television’s Agents of SHIELD comes to a close Wednesday night with a two-hour finale. As Mark Kolpack tells us, the finale two episodes of the series have some of the biggest visual effects shots of the entire show. Kolpack, who served as the studio-side visual effects supervisor for the show’s duration, says that episode 7×11 — the one that aired last week — plus the two upcoming finale episodes play off each other well, each with their own effects that ended up more cinematic than shows on network television can typically achieve.

“I mean, there’s a lot of stuff coming up that’s really great,” Kolpack said after being asked to reveal his favorite shot of the entire series. “I mean, I think 713 is a great episode. And I think it basically goes…I think the trifecta of 711, 12, 13 rounds it out pretty nicely. And I think that audiences will be very, hope that they’ll like the stories that were told in the end there and the visuals that were created to support them.”

As for the quality of the visual effects during the seven years, Kolpack attributes that to working with vendors that are based in the immediate vicinity of Los Angeles. Because SHIELD was also a show that filmed in LA, the synergy between production and post-production was seamless.

“I believe in Los Angeles talent and being loyal to it and to the community here,” he added. “And we proved that you can pull off incredible visual effects on a broadcast show and do it in Los Angeles. It doesn’t have to be elsewhere in the country, the world. You can do it here. And to that effect, it actually changed the perception of what could be done on broadcast television because of the show and how we approached it. The visual effects community grew massively.”

He concluded, “And it also was at a time when streamers were just coming into play. I mean, you had Netflix, you had Orange is the New Black and you had House of Cards, the political show. We sort of were this old guard when we came along at the end of the time and television that was then reemerging into a golden age of television again that we haven’t seen it since the fifties. So it was this new dawn, but we sort of bridged that dam, I guess.”

The two-part series finale of Agents of SHIELD airs Wednesday night starting at 9 p.m. Eastern.

What’s be your favorite shot of SHIELD‘s final season? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by tweeting our writer @AdamBarnhardt!