***This article originally appeared in the 35th Anniversary Issue of Animation Magazine (June-July ’22, No. 321)***
The VFX artists working on the fourth season of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things had their work cut out for them. Set six months after the previous season’s Battle of Starcourt which introduced new levels of mayhem and destruction to Hawkins, the new season finds the central group of friends separated for the first time and navigating the special weirdness of high school! The new narrative explores three storylines set in Lenora Hills, Calif.; a Russian gulag and Hawkins, Ind.
In fact, the creative ambition was so great that the number of episodes were expanded from eight to nine, with 30 visual effects companies working on over 4,000 shots. Rather than release everything at once, Netflix streamed the first half on May 27 and the second half was made available on July 1.
After being hired as a senior concept illustrator for Seasons 2 and 3, Michael Maher Jr. served as the visual effects supervisor for Episodes 401 to 406, while the remaining three were handled by Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates. “As a whole, I have done over 1,500 storyboards for the show and got a couple of opportunities here and there to direct second unit, which got me up to speed to supervise — which was a totally different role!” says Maher.
“But I’ve always been there through post as a visual effects art director, which meant I helped out with the visuals as the show got closer to release, with shots coming by, working on the animation and the look of the composite, and painting over things.”
Expanding the Territories
The Byers family and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) moving to Southern California and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) being a prison inmate in Russia added to the narrative scope. “There were a lot of set extensions, especially when you want to do these big outdoor settings with blizzard-like conditions,” states Maher. “A lot of the scenes in Russia, for example, were shot in Lithuania. It is always interesting taking these huge locations that have been built and doing extensions to make them look as good as they do on screen.”
Each season, there is an expectation that demons coming from the hellish dimension known as the Upside Down become even more imposing, powerful and threatening. “For Vecna, we drew a lot of inspiration early on from Nightmare on Elm Street and Pinhead from Hellraiser. The Duffers [series creators Matt and Ross Duffer] always wanted to go for a more traditional horror film. I started the designs on Venca in August 2019 and would go to the writers’ room, throw stuff out at them and see what was sticking. It took a long time to get something but I was happy with the end result.”
As Stranger Things is the Duffer Brothers’ love letter to the 1980s, the siblings have cast Robert Englund, who portrayed Freddie Kruger in Nightmare on Elm Street, as Victor Creel, a psychiatric hospital inmate responsible for a gruesome murder in the 1950s. As to whether Englund will also be playing Vecna, Maher neither confirms or denies. Nevertheless, the prosthetic makeup for the demonic adversary had to be designed to be worn by a human performer.
“That I can comment on!” he says. “It was definitely taken into consideration early on. We have done full CG creatures in the past. There was a lot of debate. You design as much as you can to make the proportions look interesting and for the creature to be iconic. It needs to stand out even if you’re just seeing a silhouette or a piece of him on camera, like an over-the-shoulder shot, or in different lighting scenarios. It was a team effort to take the idea on the page, make it into something that works on set and then augment it here and there with visual effects.”
“There is the established demon known as the Demogorgon,” says Maher, who designs and sculpts in ZBrush. “We took cues from the design of that creature, which was then populated into something that has similar language so it has the look and feel of the Upside Down. Immediately you know that it’s a creature from another world. We took inspiration from many different things. One being the Facehugger from Alien. In the end, it goes through so many hands. I pass off the concept art to the visual effects houses that build this beautiful model and animate that.”
Of course, the Upside Down plays a prominent role in Season 4. “The trick with our show is keeping true to the first season and how interesting and new that was with that wonderful nostalgia feeling and then broadening it by having more of everything, including the Upside Down,” says Maher. The special effects team was also critical to the show’s world building: “Special effects dressed huge areas with miles of crawling vines and visual effects extended the environment with our floating spores.”
Not every visual effect was leveraged from previous seasons. “One of the things that happen is you get different vendors from season to season that handle the assets,” notes Maher. “You do a handoff but then start thinking, ‘How could this be better?’ Each season we try to improve all of our assets. This season, we’ve gotten the closest to mimicking the stuff that was on set and making it fit in with the practical seamlessly. There were a lot of opportunities for that in this season specifically; that was a big focus because we have so much of the Upside Down.”
‘Stranger Things’ S4. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
Otherworldly Effects
The number of visual effects shots in Season 4 has greatly surpassed what has been previously done for the series. “It’s above 4,000 shots, at least. I don’t know the final number,” says the VFX supervisor. “We used about 30 different vendors, which is big for our show. This season is enormous as far as the effort from people in Germany, Canada, United States, China and India. An old standard is Rodeo FX, which has helped us out with our creature work in the past and has done a great job with difficult animation.”
Approximately 300 days were devoted to principal photography. “They do such great work in the edit but it just takes time to get an episode,” adds Maher. “We were getting stuff later than we would love; however, that’s always the way with visual effects.”
Overall, the biggest challenge was the amount and complexity of the visual effects work. “So many things have been shared between the vendors, but luckily, we have such a solid team that the handoff happens for the most part smoothly,” he concludes. “We have struggled with that in the past. There is stuff we have never tackled before. I’m not able to say anything specific, but I can’t wait for you to see it.”
The complete Stranger Things Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
