It's always a lot of work, especially in Season 1 and 2. As a production designer, you always hope for a set that is a character in its own right or that goes through some evolution in the course of a season or gets featured in the way the Byers’ house was featured. From a production standpoint, what was it like to have to constantly trash it? READ MORE: Go Behind the Scenes of ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 With These ‘80s Retro PhotosĮven though the Byers are in California for Season 4, their old house in Hawkins is definitely one of the most memorable in the show, and we all know chaos happens there. ![]() It’s a lot of trial and error, but we have a method down, and we’ve got assembly - an Upside Down tentacle-building factory, essentially. It's some sort of organic pussy willow fluff, basically. We float different kinds of organic material in the air. But when we're inside the Wheeler's house, for instance, or the Byers’ house or any interior environment where we're doing the nether, it's almost always 95% practical. Visual effects does a lot of extension when we're outside in these vast environments. After a lot of back and forth, and a lot of experimenting with different materials - rubbers, foams, plastics, all kinds of different paints - we arrived at this approach where we build all these crazy vines and we adhere them to everything and then we have this whole method of painting around them. But we always wanted to attempt anything practically, so it’s about what physical materials we use. Obviously we've expanded in such a way that visual effects have become a big part of our world and our language, just because of the scale of things. So you build most of the Upside Down it’s not generated by special effects? We had a lot of references to mold and mildew and diseases spreading and microscopic photography that we were interested in, “How do we translate all that?” That’s how we went into Season 1, and we still maintain the ethos. We were limited in our research and development back then, but we had a pretty specific idea of what we wanted it to look like: spreading disease and this set of tentacles and spores. At the time, we called it “Nether,” because it just felt like this netherworld version of reality. In the early days, when our resources were more limited was easy to talk about but not necessarily easy to figure out how to execute. ![]() Generally, we shoot the real world of the script and then shoot the Upside Down. Do you build every set twice - one regular, one dark and demented - or do you create one set and make it all look horrible? It may be on a parallel plane, but it also mirrors the characters’ real world. Let’s start with everyone’s favorite alternate dimension, the Upside Down, which is obviously alive and well in Season 4.
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