The in-house vfx team at Universal television was tasked with making the last three episodes of Battlestar Galactica radically different. All images courtesy of Sci Fi Channel.

After four seasons and 75 episodes, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) signed off last Friday with a rousing, surprising two-hour finale that brings the gripping drama to a close. While many potential viewers were immediately put off by the title alone, audiences willing to give it a try were amply rewarded. The show amassed a dedicated following that was more than willing to stick by this bleak, absorbing sci-fi story that boldly dared to explore such controversial themes as religion, war, and our very existence as human beings more deeply than any other contemporary series on TV.

Battlestar Galactica won a Hugo Award in 2005 and a Peabody in 2006 for its writing, but the show has also been a trailblazer technically especially for its visual effects work. From the beginning, Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel has led the various incarnations of the vfx team, from their start with Zoic Studios to its current in-house set up with Universal television, and their superior work has been universally recognized by their peers. The team won two Emmy's for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series and this year's VES for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series. With their work on Battlestar, Hutzel and his team raised the bar in creating gritty, documentary-style visual effects that allowed even the most heightened storyline in the series to come across as absolutely authentic and unquestionably real.

In an exclusive chat with VFXWorld, series re-inventor and exec producer Ronald D. Moore says of Hutzel's team, "Their contribution has been enormous. They provided a reality to the world that allowed the audience to suspend their disbelief and accept the dramatic story taking place with our characters. The vfx team convinced the audience that all of these things were really happening, that these Vipers really did fly around and someone had to go shoot them with real cameras. I feel like this was the first time that what happened outside a spaceship was as real as what was happening inside."

Centurions were allowed to emote much more as the series progressed. Gary Hutzel's team was given a very short window of time to finish up the back-end of the final season.

With the finale under their belt (except for a matte bump they were fixing at the last minute), Hutzel joins us again to talk about the end of an era as the Battlestar Galactica chapter closes and his visual effects future continuing the show's mythology in the spin-off series, Caprica.

"As far as the last 10 BSG episodes, the culmination of our work is in the final three hours," Hutzel explains. "The rest of the episodes we really just played more of a supporting role. There wasn't much needed of us. My overall take on the last half of the season was that we had a light schedule of a variety of visual effect sequences where nothing particularly new or demanding was asked for. I think that was Ron looking at [the series] and saying we have a lot of story to cover."

The Sci Fi Channel ordered 22 episodes for the last season and aired the first half in 2008 and then the final 10 episodes in 2009. That year-long spacing translated into a very front-loaded season which was atypical of any season's visual effects work. "In the first half, there was a mish mash of stuff wrapping up storylines from the third season and then they got serious about [tying it up] in the last 10 shows," Hutzel explains. "I think they realized, 'Holy cow we have a lot of ground to cover!' But for us the visual effects were draped on and more a result of thinking we need get outside and give them a break rather than integrated storytelling. And the back 10 were all episodes that languished a long time in editorial. They came to us piecemeal and we did little bits here and there to complete them. There wasn't the usual focus on each individual show. It was more let's get these shots done. Normally we like to focus on individual shows because that's the way Galactica's always been -- it's about the whole picture -- and in the final [post] integrate all of the ideas as much as we can. But we didn't have a lot of that to do in the final 10."