Stranger Things' VFX Team Explains Season 2's Visual Effects

This is Notes on a Scene, my name is Christina Graff.

And I'm Paul Graff and we led the visual effects team

of Stranger Things season two.

You remember me?

And will you let us pass?

(growls)

Okay, okay.

I'm sorry.

In the climax of chapter nine,

there's like three storylines that converge

and they're all visual effects storylines.

The section that we'll cover is primarily underground.

There's interconnected passageways and in these tunnels,

the Demodogs are living.

Okay, so here we are in this forechamber,

it's a like a big circular place

and Will just ran into Dart,

and that's Dart here on the side.

And actually on the day,

we had just a plastic head on a broomstick,

and I was operating the plastic head,

so we have an eye line here.

They have something to look at.

Dustin pulls out his nougat,

and his love for this animal is paying off

and saves everybody's life.

The Demodogs, they have five different stages.

The first stage is about the size of a large tadpole.

The second is about the size of a nice frog or toad,

and the third is about the size of a cat,

and the fourth is about the size of a dog.

We going from cute here,

and then we go right here, we go to scary.

The thing is, it's kind of difficult

to be cute with these animals,

because if anybody has ever noticed,

they don't have eyes.

We still, they have to convey their emotions

and reactions just with body language,

and so that was really important to the Duffers and to us.

If you go to chapter three and chapter four,

there's like a whole evolution

of this little cute Dart animal,

and we kind of don't wanna give away right away

that it's a Demogorgon, and of course the thing

where you would see that is when the mouth opens,

so it doesn't have a petal mouth

until it gets to stage three,

and stage three is when he eats the cat,

because we have to communicate this to the kids,

so they know what they're actually looking like.

Dustin was really excited about it,

how these creatures look and how they move,

so everybody knew, oh they're gonna be really cute,

and they're gonna look really good,

but on the day, we don't have those.

So I figured, why don't we just 3D print those.

[Christina] First of all, it was something tactile,

they could actually see what the weight

of a Demogorgon would be in their hands.

What we did is we took always one

of our puppets into the first take,

and then eventually, we'd take everything out,

and say we just play just completely without,

unless it's something where they're really handling it,

and being interactive,

like with the putting the pollywog under his hat.

(eerie music)

There's these snowy particles that you always find

in the Upside Down and they're called spores,

because we think that they are seeding

the Upside Down world and the Upside Down plants.

You don't just get to put some random things in here,

and just not have them art directed.

I can see that pretty much every shot,

spores have been treated with a lot of love

to the way they are moving, to the depths of field.

They need to sit right in the shot,

and sometimes there is ones

that just curl right by the lens,

but they never wanna be too much in your face or too little.

It's just sort of a balance that has to be found,

and so I can say I'm very proud of the spores of season two.

They react to flashlights.

There's all kinds of funky stuff

that's going on with these spores.

They are randomly generated,

so you'll have some spores that misbehave

and do something stupid,

like they spin really fast

or they run just right over the nose of somebody

when it's an emotional moment, and they're 99% CG.

What happens is there's basically

a cutout called rotoscoping.

You'll have to rotoscope each object

or creature that's in the foreground,

and lots of times you'll have to do things

in the background too, to create depth,

so that you can add spores in 3D space

in zSpace throughout the scene.

And you'll add atmosphere--

And they can flow around.

They do funky stuff and they react.

They're not just a sort of a snow pass

that's overlaid over everything.

They're actually in 3D space,

and when the camera racks, it racks in the spore space.

Come on!

(Demodogs shriek)

(Dustin yells)

(Demodogs shriek)

The tunnels were designed as kind of a cross breed

between production design and visual effects.

You can't really move a camera inside

of these tunnels because they have

all of these ridges and rifts,

and you can hardly walk in them,

but you can definitely do a dolly shot or something,

so as they turn around,

the dogs come around the corner.

They're looking at the dogs,

and then they turn around as the dogs run towards camera.

There was no tunnel, there was just the tunnel behind them,

and then we just filled in the rest

of the tunnel in the foreground.

This was the end,

so the set extends out. There were little lights

around it, so he can track it,

and we know where the edges,

and then we basically do a digital

tunnel extension on top of it.

(eerie music)

(Demodog shrieks)

This is the climax,

basically the climax of the entire season two.

While the visual effects in Stranger Things

are not really the main attraction,

we could do a bad job and really hurt the show,

and what we have here,

we have this kind of shark cage elevator

that they're going down in this place

that's called the rift chamber,

and that's actually the only set that doesn't exist.

This yellow outline is the only practical thing

on that set, plus obviously the actors.

Yeah, so it's basically an empty room,

and then inside of this empty room,

you have three blue screens, big panels,

with wheels at the bottom so you can run them around.

There's another one here,

and then we have some light sources.

It's red and yellow, so let's use yellows.

Basically then we have light hitting them

from different places and different intensities.

And wind, we would have some propellors, right?

And that's really it.

That's it, that's all we had.

(gun firing)

(eerie music)

This skin is what we call the rift membrane.

We have a couple of things that are flying around,

and then you have all the wind and the atmosphere,

and how does that interact with each other?

And then behind this, you have the shadow man,

which again, is like its own entity,

but they all have to speak to each other.

It all has to sit in the same scene.

(Demodog growling)

(gun firing) (Demodog shrieks)

[Hopper] Oh, shit!

(gun firing)

The cage needed to shake a lot

once those Demodogs were jumping on top of the cage.

There needed to be some sort of instability underneath them,

'cause something heavy's just landed.

Yeah, and we thought maybe we'll have somebody jump

on the roof of the cage,

but first idea wasn't too excited about it.

(laughs)

Didn't happen.

And so we had somebody below the cage just rattling it,

because it's a box,

so it doesn't matter where it comes from,

so we had somebody stand below the cage

and jerk it real hard when the dog lands.

That's when Eleven kills the Demogorgon

at the very end of season one.

He kind of turns into this cloud of ashy particles,

and so at the very beginning

when we were talking about the Shadow Monster,

we were like, what if it's made out

of these kind of ashy particles?

Maybe we just take that theme

and just develop it into the next round,

and what do we have that kind of are ashy particles,

and electric, and big, and black,

and we have tornadoes and he have bit storms

and volcanic eruptions, that's what was

kind of the source material for this monster.

(eerie music)

So what you have here is Shadow Monster comes out swirling.

It's a particle system,

so it's basically just a bunch of particles swirling around.

She basically builds a shield,

and it just spreads everything out sideways.

She just pushes back, and while she's hitting this,

she's already airborne and floating,

and she's actually hanging off of a wire rig.

She's not connected with the cage.

You can see that her eyes are looking a little odd.

They're really black and really big,

and so that's digitally done,

and then there's veins forming here,

all of these little guys forming

under her skin and around her eyes.

It was digital makeup, and basically you start

just putting a bunch of dots around her face

so you know how it's moving,

and you can attach something to her face.

Tracking marker.

We have different iterations of really intense

and less intense and we wanted her obviously

to still be Eleven, find a nice balance

between her being in a very extreme state,

and turning into a monster.

We didn't want her to look like a monster,

so it was a little bit of dialing in,

dialing forward, and dialing back a little bit,

and this is the result

that we all felt really excited about.

(dramatic music)