Go behind the scenes with Stranger Things’ special effects gurus

Despite not having seen a single episode of Netflix’s smash hit, Stranger Things, the Emmy award-winning husband and wife Visual Effects team of Paul and Christina Graff were quick to sign on for season 2, when offered the job by showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer. After a quick binge, the pair were ready for the challenges of season 2, and their work eventually earned them an Emmy nomination. Hoping to bring home the gold, the Graff’s discussed their work with SyFy Wire ahead of the September 17th Emmy awards show. Paul explained how their involvement began.

"We got a rough outline of stuff, and 50 percent of that outline was truly crazy stuff that they had come up with. As we started developing what the Shadow Monster could look like, what the Rift could look like, we’d see a script, have a discussion with the Duffers, and then the next script would have what we were talking about on the page. That was really cool."

One of those ideas, was a collapsing bridge, that Christina explained was eventually morphed into the collapsing tunnel seen in Eight’s introduction, “there are no bridges to shoot on in Atlanta! So we reinvented what that could be, and made it a tunnel which we could extend with CG.” Another change according to Paul? Eight was nearly not Eight, “Eight was a different number. And it wasn’t a girl. He was a guy.” A super-powered love interest for Eleven? That could have been interesting.

The Graff’s work on season 2 included both digital and practical effects, using 3D printers to create portions of the Demodog. Per Paul, “When Bob is killed, we couldn’t 3D print a whole Demodog, but we could do the head and the paw, and then the head and paw were used when the Demodog goes in the fridge.” Hey, if this guy can print a Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, you can print a Demodog. But I digress.

Christina detailed how the team collaborated to tie everything together, including effects from the show’s first season.

"Paul and I spent a lot of time in creative discussions with the Duffer brothers and [production designer] Chris Trujillo, and we came up with some core ideas of how certain things could move, how they could act with each other. How do these electrical disturbances in Season 1 tie into Season 2? How does the storm tie into that? Where does the storm come from? Is it a natural phenomenon, or a supernatural phenomenon? And the Rift… it’s actually alive. So we spent a lot of time discussing that, and then coming up with some reference images and a visual vocabulary."

Season 2 continued to focus on the Upside Down, along with a new villain, the Mind Flayer, who brought a new batch of atmospheric special effects. Paul detailed the inspiration for those creepy effects came from a real-world phenomenon, “we started looking for really cool storms, and Chris Trujillo found these clouds over a volcanic eruption, and it was like red lightning striking out of these really dark ash-filled clouds. So we had volcano eruptions, we had tornadoes catching fire…” All of which sounds insane by the way.

The climax of season 2 saw Eleven and Chief Hopper descend into the Rift cavern, a sequence created almost entirely using the Graff’s handiwork.

"There was nothing there except the shark cage — that’s what we were calling the elevator — the actors, the blue screen, and the lights. The entire environment had to be modeled out early on to understand what the scale would be, and to work out perspective for the camera. So we had to storyboard that frame by frame, shot by shot."

In post-production, the Duffer Brothers came up with an idea for the Rift, which not originally in the script according to Paul. “The Rift is pulsing, and it’s like it wakes up and gradually becomes more agitated. The red light becomes brighter, and the intensity of the light becomes stronger.” It certainly added to the atmosphere of the scene.

Of course, Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven was the key catalyst in closing the Rift, and the Graffs again lent their expertise to enhancing Brown’s performance. “Without making her look like a monster, we added a lot of texture and veins to her face, and changed the pupils of her eyes in post-production.” Mission accomplished.

Elsewhere, the cast and crew (including the Graffs) praised the skills of the Duffer Brothers work on season 2, in this Emmy promotional video from Netflix.

Seems like one big happy family on set. Daw. Stranger Things season 3 is set to debut some time in 2019, and will be “worth the wait”.

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