Stranger Things season 4 has recently taken the world by storm, thanks to its writing and stellar acting. However, what really helped the TV series hit hard was all of its impressive visual effects that saw the sinister Upside Down expand to never-seen heights. But, all the eerie imagery wasn’t crafted in a single day, and it turns out that the effects weren’t made even in a single year.
In an interview with Collider, Stranger Things VFX Supervisor Julien Hery revealed that one shot in the Netflix series took two years to get right. In the latest chapter of the sci-fi series, we were introduced to the big bad Vecna, whose backstory was directly tied to The Creel House. In Stranger Things season 4, we get a birds-eye view of the entire dark version of Vecna’s Hawkins via the perspective of demon bats. While that visual moment may feel small in the grand scheme of things, it is actually this shot which is a testament to the team’s hard work.
“Actually, there’s a fun fact; we started before the pandemic on this show; we started to work on it more than two years ago. We actually started to develop a few looks, started to work on the assets before the pandemic,” Hery explained.
“And when it stopped, we kept working on one or two shots. One is a flyover of Hawkins — to follow the bats over Hawkins, and then you land onto the Creel House.”
“And this shot took us almost a year and a half or two years of making it happen, changing the animation, and there was plenty of time, so we took like such a long time to develop that shot,” Hery continued. “So it was pretty cool.”
All of the hard work paid off, as fans got to see a fully formed alternate version of Hawkins in the Upside Down. Still, despite the impressive results, we are hoping that Stranger Things season 5 doesn’t take two years to finish like its predecessor.
Currently, there is no firm Stranger Things season 5 release date. While we wait on updates, here is our guide on the best monster movies of all time.