Digital Domain’s Mitch Drain Explains Continuing VFX Work During Pandemic

ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with Digital Domain's Mitch Drain. The VFX company worked on some big shots during the final season of Agents of SHIELD, and Drain told us how they brought the helicarrier in the series finale to life. During the interview, we asked Drain how the pandemic has altered things in the VFX world and what the limitations are now that most people are working from home.

"I have to say that for Digital Domain, it's been an amazingly kind of transparent process. Our last day in the office was March 13th and on March 16th I fired up the equipment at home and I was back to work. For me, I can't speak to the other supervisors and other artists, but for me, it was a very, very transparent process and for clients. There's good and bad. I mean, obviously, I can interact with people like we are now [on Zoom] and that's always great. But there's almost no substitute for really sitting down next to the artist and trying things out and doing that one to one, eye to eye, face to face. This is the next best thing and it does work quite well."

"The one thing that may be a bit of a handicap, and I hesitate to use 'handicap' because we're working around it just fine, is that if you're working on a feature film, you want to see things in the screening room. You want to see it how the audience can see it. Of course at home, sure, if DD wants to send me a 70 inch TV I guess I'll put it up in my office. But in lieu of that, I have my computer monitors and I can review work that way. So I do miss the ability to see things in their biggest, largest form. However, I will say, as things get better and as we get more used to this way of working, I'm certain there's ways that I could get down to the studio and go into the screening room and look at work that way. There's a solution to all of these problems."

To learn more about what Digital Domain did on the final season of Agents of SHIELD, you can check out the video at the top of the page.

The first six seasons of Agents of SHIELD are streaming on Netflix, and you can watch the series finale on Hulu.