"And this shot took us almost a year and half or two years of making it happen."
VFX Supervisor Julien Hery chatted recently about how one scene from 'Stranger Things' season four took over two years to bring to life, because the VFX team needed it to look as great as it possibly could.
And surprisingly, it's not a shot that includes Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). However, it is of course a scene from The Upside Down. The Creel house, whereby Venca/Number One/Henry Creel began to become powerful as a child, became a focal point during season four as Max (Sadie Sink) and the rest of the Hawkins crew began to hatch a plan from inside the dwelling.
With so much time for the team to perfect the VFX (thanks in part to the pandemic), Hery says the team utilized this extra downtime to bring one particular shot to life. Julien told Collider: "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. 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 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. So it was pretty cool."
And the effects, as you'll no doubt agree, were pretty nightmarish. Those freaky Upside Down bats, or Demobats, nearly caused the demise of fan-favourite Steve (Joe Keery) early on in the season. Unfortunately, new character Eddie (Joseph Quinn), did fall at the wings of these flesh-eating monsters, but not before giving an awe-inspiring rendition of 'Master of Puppets'.
