‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Set Tour Part 2

[intriguing upbeat music]

Hello, I'm Chris Trujillo.

I'm the production designer on Stranger Things.

I've been with the show since the beginning

and we are in our fifth season.

I'm excited to show you guys around.

[upbeat music]

We are standing at the entrance to the Pain Tree.

This is one of the most unique sets we've ever built

and one of the most epically gross.

This is our entrance way,

I like to call it our esophageal hallway

where we enter into the belly of the beast.

All of this is an enormous foam sculpture

essentially with metal infrastructure.

What we've done essentially is physically realize

the concept art, creature vision of Michael Maher,

who's our head concept designer.

And this in season five is where we find

Vecna puppeteering his monster essentially.

We have an incredible sculptural team this year.

Alex Sherrod is our lead sculptor.

We took all of our cues from organic matter.

We did some very deep dive disgusting research

into internal organs, flayed bodies, you name it,

to figure out how to achieve all of these

deeply unsettling organic textures

and to give this sense of being inside the body

of a creature.

Season to season, we've kind of upped the ante on the horror

and we've also played with different genres of horror.

I think the first season was maybe more Spielbergian

and then we started to veer a little more John Carpenter,

things were getting a little more terrifying

and we all love David Cronenberg's films

and that sort of body horror vibe.

And I think always staying within the bounds of something

that's watchable to, you know, a teenage audience.

[chuckles]

The sets obviously reflect that sort of darkening

of the storyline and this is sort of at the apex

of that evolution in the horror of Stranger Things.

All of these spikes are designed

so that they can be literally lifted up with two people,

clearly not with one person.

Two people can get together

and in seconds lift these spikes up, carry them away,

and we can roll a techno crane into place.

That enormous esophageal hallway

that we walked through moments ago

is actually all built on a deck system

so that when necessary we are able with just a few people

to grab a hold of the sides of it and break it apart

and separate it and bring a technocrane

right in through the middle.

Another added challenge to the whole design process was

each of these columns is meant to encapsulate

and contain a different child

who's being sort of psychically used to fuel the monster.

You'll see here we have our dummies in currently,

we had custom made dummies

to match all of our children actors,

and the section right in front of them is a membrane.

These are all designed in collaboration

with our special effects team to be tearaway.

So a person inside the column is able to push through

this organic membrane and break through it

and free themselves.

It's pretty gruesome,

but it's actually really beautiful in action.

[eerie music]

[Will gasps]

[upbeat music]

We wanted to show what the golden age of radio

would've looked like.

So architecturally we took our cues from this art deco style

that was really prominent

and popular in the early days of radio.

I presented to Duffer Brothers,

as I always do when designing a new set for the first time

with a very lengthy lookbook

that showed them all of my ideas.

And in that lookbook, one of the images

that they really responded to was a picture of the exterior

of an old radio station,

and that's the radio station that as kids

we would drive by and see.

And it was part of the inspiration

for writing the set into the script.

They were gracious enough to let

my Supervising Art Director Sean Brennan and I

come and pay them a quick visit.

There's all kinds of little details that were very specific

to the functioning of a radio station

that I might not have necessarily considered,

even down to something as mundane

as this copper stripping on the floor.

This was all part of a grounding system

because there's obviously a great deal

of electrical current running through a radio station.

The DJ booth we knew would be central to our business

in the radio station.

We talked to a lot of folks who had personal experience

as broadcasters back in the time period,

and to make sure that everything we have electronically

and the way we laid it out is as accurate as it can be.

The history is also present in the design here.

And in the set you can see obviously the bones

of the set are this, art deco era radio station,

but kind of slowly became Hawkins Rock Radio Station.

We really wanted to make a space that was continuous

with the overall vibe of our show,

which is, colors are saturated, but tones are muted

and there's a texture to everything,

even the corner of a wall.

This is not necessarily the most beautiful thing

in the world, but as a design choice

it sort of informs the overall lived inness

of the world of Stranger Things.

All of these are sort of these transmitters.

We couldn't buy this stuff

so we painstakingly surveyed all of it

and we were able to recreate down to like rivets and logos.

It's an exciting day for me.

Your friend entertainer and DJ Robin Buckley.

Nice to meet you. AKA Rocking Robin.

[upbeat music]

Over here in our kitchen, we knew that we needed a space

for our characters to hang out and refuel,

so we kind of repurposed

what is essentially like the machine shop

of our radio station.

And this is another place where our set deck team shines

and our graphics team really shines.

We will literally go and buy a lot off of eBay

of original 40-year-old cheese puffs, cheese curls,

and when that is not possible, we always make sure

that we recreate our boxes accurately.

We had another very specific scripted element

where our gang needed to have a secret hideout.

We have this mechanical room that you enter into

and it doesn't go anywhere.

This door goes back out into the first floor,

but we needed a secret door

to get us into the gang secret layer in the basement.

So came up with this idea.

And voila, our entry into the basement set.

[upbeat music]

[electricity buzzes]

We were able to build from the ground up

the entire exterior radio station,

which was a massive undertaking

and we even built the bottom 60 feet

of the transmission tower

because it factors in pretty heavily into the action.

[upbeat music]

I just wanted to take a quick minute to show you guys

the upper portions of our radio tower,

which we have here on stage.

As you can see, we've built the middle

and top of our towers all out of steel.

Our actors are climbing up them

in these very intense climactic scenes.

And again, you can see we're covering the towers with vines

because of course we have to have our tower

in the Upside Down as well as in the right side up.

[upbeat music]

So now we are in the Hawkins lab basement tank lab.

Conspicuously absent is our tank.

We are actually in the process

of running a special effects test on it

because naturally we have to blow the glass out of it

and have water flood out into our set.

As you can see, we are in the Upside Down for the first time

in Hawkins lab basement.

These are our tried and true vines.

This is our medium vine. These are our little vines.

Essentially the core of these is just a pool noodle,

like what you would play with in summertime.

And inside that there's a metal wire armature

that allows 'em to be manipulated.

And then around the outside

we wrap a sort of resin soaked fabric

that then gets painted with tinted rubberized paints,

which create this kind of permanent shine

and make them very cleanable, which is essential

'cause film sets get very dirty and dusty.

Additionally here you can see our scenic department comes

and this very essential finishing touch

to making the vines feel like they're actually growing

on the surfaces.

[wind whooshes]

It might be time to get a maid, Wheeler.

And I think at some point our special effects department

told me that we had just hundreds of miles of vines.

Evidently we actually were a big boon

to the pool noodle industry generally,

and maybe one specific manufacturers

of pool noodles are still around today

because of the Upside Down vines.

As with everything Upside Down related,

there's always a layer of visual effects

that lends everything a little more gravity than

what it may look like in a sort of

just a brightly lit working environment.

So it may not seem like the realist thing

in the world right now,

but once lighting and special effects atmosphere

and then of course a visual effects layer

gets added to it all

that's what really brings it to life.

[eerie music]

Oh shit. That's not good.

[ominous music]

We are in the hallways of Hawkins lab.

It's been part of the show

since the very beginning of the series.

This season the lab is in the Upside Down,

and it's in a very uniquely supernatural state.

So one of our biggest challenges this season was

trying to figure out how do we represent a building melting

in a supernatural way.

And to that end, we arrived at this.

The building is sort of melting from the top down.

We designed our hallways in a way where

as you're progressing through the sets,

the melt is getting more and more severe.

[eerie music]

So one of the things that was exciting for us this season

was that we are gonna be able

to finally build Hawkins lab on stage,

and previously we've had to work

within the confines of the practical location

and it was important to us that we be faithful

to the practical location

that we've all come to know and love,

all of the architectural conditions are dead match

to the location only obviously

with the added surreal madness of the melt.

If you look out here,

we have what's called a Brizo lay panel,

which is essentially these giant metal panels.

They're kind of a really essential aesthetic element

of the building and actually one of the reasons

why we chose the location to begin with

and I think why it's so iconic.

And we were fortunate enough to be able

to harvest the actual panels from our location,

which sadly has been demolished.

We spent months drawing and playing with different materials

and trying to decide how are we gonna create

these big organic shapes.

All of these walls are actually two to three feet of foam,

which our sculptors then came in

and carved directly into

for then pouring various foams over top of those

to kind of get these more natural undulations

and puddles and pools.

And I was particularly interested in references

of these sort of bubbling natural mud pits

that you see in different places in the world.

So that ended up being a sort of guiding reference

for the finished look of the melt of the goo,

as we've come to call it.

We have many different material finishes,

so you've got the metal melting,

and in some instances we've got the plastic

of the lights melting.

So it was a lot of fun for our paint department

to figure out how to represent

all of those different materials in their melted form.

Oftentimes, you know, camera,

the director of cinematographer,

they want to get something interesting in the foreground.

To that end, we've got a good dozen of these

that you know, on a moment's notice we can kind of shift it

and get it in front of camera, reposition it,

affix it to the ceiling,

and now you've got some interesting foreground,

because the nature of the architecture inside Hawkins lab,

it's very sort of monotonous

and each floor is essentially the same

as the floor below it.

So to be able to kind of sell this space

as multiple different levels of the lab, it was necessary

to make elements like this that are movable.

[upbeat music]

I thought it was worth making a brief stop here.

This is our melty set,

and what makes this one particularly special is

this is one of two sets.

We have a scene in which a couple of our characters

are trapped inside a room

and the walls start to actively melt.

This is the after version of that set

where everything has dried and the day is saved.

But we also have the water retaining set

that, you know, was designed by special effects

to hold thousands of gallons of the goo

in an active melt scene.

This is the set that corresponds

to the solidified melty goo set.

Up there you can see the tank,

there were six of those tanks ready to pump 13,000 gallons

of goo into this set with our actors sloshing around in it.

[upbeat music]

Prior to this season,

we've only seen Hawkins lab roof from aerial shots.

This season it was essential

that we'd be able to get up on the roof.

And this I think is a really excellent example of the things

that I've enjoyed the most

in terms of the creative construction of this stuff.

It's equally impressive to me as a designer

that we have craftspeople

who can carve these beautiful surreal sculptures.

And then we have craftspeople simultaneously

who are recreating,

I mean to the most subtle textural detail,

the actual reality of what's going on at the location.

I mean even something as sort of humble

as the floor here required quite a lot of thought

and craftsmanship to recreate the sort of layers

of years and years of a building

sort of deteriorating in the elements.

[upbeat music]

We're stepping in now to

what is essentially downtown Hawkins,

which we know and love from previous seasons,

but this year the military has shut it down

and you can see the cataclysmic rift situation

of season four left the town in shambles.

Our building facades here,

we directly one for one recreated our downtown block

from location in Jackson, Georgia,

and now the military has gone to great lengths

to create an access port into the Upside Down.

[ominous tense music]

My first thought went to my experiences in New York.

When you see historic buildings that are being preserved,

when a facade needs to be preserved,

oftentimes you'll see this enormous steel architecture

that's sort of built around the historical facade

in order to retain it while work is done on the inside.

This architectural arch we have here,

that is a giant supernatural membrane gate

into the Upside Down.

So it's important for us to make something obviously

that looks really interesting and has a heaviness

and shows without any uncertainty,

a very intense cold military presence.

All of our designs are based on research

into what these sort of mobile

and modular military installations look like

when the military is setting up a temporary operation

in a foreign country, in a war zone,

or just generally anywhere in a disaster area.

And we are always working

within the realm of budgetary realities.

We essentially bought and reclad

and purpose fit all of these old shipping containers

with military hardware.

And this is the first time we've ever done such a large

and like semi-permanent blue screen

as you can see this giant blue wall

also built of shipping containers,

that is essentially allowing VFX

to extend the world of Hawkins beyond our backlogs.

We knew that quite a lot of our business here

was gonna be at night,

and we always collaborate very closely

with the camera department, with the lighting department

to figure out what's gonna kind of work best for everybody

so that we're getting the most interesting,

most period appropriate practical lighting

that we can to have on camera

and simultaneously give them the motivation they need

to light a massive night scene,

which is no small feat obviously.

And we knew we wanted Hummers.

Hummers were actually fairly new to the middle eighties

and all of the accoutrement on the Hummer,

all of that stuff was painstakingly found

to make sure that even the vehicles

that our characters are driving around in

are as period correct as they possibly can be.

Way back in the beginning of Stranger Things,

we actually ended up landing on Jackson, Georgia

because the architecture as it existed

was still pretty near a time capsule,

so we had to obviously redress windows.

We had to add some details to the facades.

Over here we've got Royal Furniture Co.,

named in honor of Jess Royal, who has been with me

and been the set decorator on the show

since the beginning as well.

Stranger Things has to pay homage

to the electronics giant of the eighties, Radio Shack.

It briefly moved over to the mall,

but actually this season we get to kind of bring it back

and they reopening in downtown Hawkins.

[gunshots popping]

The Radio Shack.

If We move quick enough, I think we can make it.

Get into the tunnels and get the hell out of here.

Okay.

[upbeat music]

Stranger Things has always been especially gratifying

as a production designer and in so many ways.

It is the type of project you dream of.

[upbeat music]