- 2 weeks ago
Architectural Digest again visits with 'Stranger Things' Production Designer Chris Trujillo for a second behind the scenes look into the world of Season five's sets. From the sinewy, grotesque Pain Tree and the radio tower of WSQK to roof, hallways and basement recesses of Hawkins Lab, take a final look at the world of Stranger Things as the iconic series comes to a close.
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00:01Hello, I'm Chris Trujillo.
00:03I'm the production designer on Stranger Things.
00:05I've been with the show since the beginning,
00:07and we are in our fifth season.
00:09I'm excited to show you guys around.
00:25We are standing at the entrance to The Pain Tree.
00:28This is one of the most unique sets we've ever built
00:30and one of the most epically gross.
00:34This is our entranceway.
00:35I like to call it our esophageal hallway,
00:37where we enter into the belly of the beast.
00:40All of this is an enormous foam sculpture, essentially,
00:43with metal infrastructure.
00:45What we've done essentially is physically realize
00:48the concept art creature vision of Michael Maher,
00:51who's our head concept designer.
00:53And this, in season five,
00:55is where we find Vecna puppeteering his monster, essentially.
01:00We have an incredible sculptural team this year.
01:02Alex Sherrod is our lead sculptor.
01:04We took all of our cues from organic matter.
01:06We did some very deep dive, disgusting research
01:10into internal organs, flayed bodies, you name it,
01:14to figure out how to achieve all of these deeply unsettling
01:19organic textures,
01:21and to give this sense of being inside the body of a creature.
01:26Season to season, we've kind of upped the ante on the horror,
01:29and we've also played with different genres of horror.
01:33You know, I think the first season was maybe more Spielbergian,
01:36and then we started to veer a little more John Carpenter.
01:39Things were getting a little more terrifying,
01:41and we all love David Cronenberg's films
01:43and that sort of body horror vibe.
01:45And I think always staying within the bounds of something
01:48that's watchable to, you know, a teenage audience.
01:51The sets obviously reflect that sort of darkening of the storyline,
01:56and this is sort of at the apex of that evolution
01:59in the horror of Stranger Things.
02:01All of these spikes are designed so that they can be literally lifted up
02:06with two people, clearly not with one person.
02:08Two people can get together and in seconds lift these spikes up,
02:12carry them away, and we can roll a technocrane into place.
02:15The enormous esophageal hallway that we walked through moments ago
02:19is actually all built on a deck system,
02:21so that when necessary we are able, with just a few people,
02:25to grab ahold of the sides of it and break it apart and separate it
02:28and bring a technocrane right in through the middle.
02:30Another added challenge to the whole design process was
02:33each of these columns is meant to encapsulate
02:36and contain a different child who's being sort of psychically used
02:41to fuel the monster.
02:43You'll see here we have our dummies in currently.
02:45We had custom-made dummies to match all of our children actors,
02:49and the section right in front of them is a membrane.
02:53These are all designed in collaboration with our special effects team
02:56to be tear-away, so a person inside the column is able to push through
03:02this organic membrane and break through it and free themselves.
03:07It's pretty gruesome, but it's actually really beautiful in action.
03:10We wanted to show what the golden age of radio would have looked like,
03:30so architecturally we took our cues from this art deco style
03:34that was really prominent and popular in the early days of radio.
03:38I presented to Duffer Brothers as I always do when designing a new set
03:42for the first time with a very lengthy lookbook that showed them all of my ideas.
03:47And in that lookbook, one of the images that they really responded to
03:52was a picture of the exterior of an old radio station,
03:56and that's the radio station that as kids we would drive by and see,
04:00and it was part of the inspiration for writing the set into the script.
04:04They were gracious enough to let my supervising art director, Sean Brennan,
04:07and I come and pay them a quick visit.
04:09There's all kinds of little details that were very specific to the functioning
04:14of a radio station that I might not have necessarily considered,
04:17even down to something as mundane as this copper stripping on the floor
04:21this was all part of a grounding system because there's obviously a great deal
04:26of electrical current running through a radio station.
04:30The DJ booth we knew would be central to our business in the radio station.
04:34We talked to a lot of folks who had personal experience as broadcasters
04:39back in the time period to make sure that everything we have electronically
04:44and the way we laid it out is as accurate as it can be.
04:47The history is also present in the design here in the set.
04:52You can see obviously the bones of the set are this art deco era radio station,
04:58but kind of slowly became Hawkins rock radio station.
05:01We really wanted to make a space that was continuous with the overall vibe of our show,
05:06which is colors are saturated, but tones are muted and there's a texture to everything.
05:10Even the corner of a wall, this is not necessarily the most beautiful thing in the world,
05:15but as a design choice it sort of informs the overall lived-in-ness of the world of Stranger Things.
05:22All of these are sort of these transmitters.
05:24We couldn't buy this stuff, so we painstakingly surveyed all of it
05:29and we were able to recreate down to like rivets and logos.
05:34It's an exciting day for me, your friend, entertainer, and DJ Robin Buckley.
05:39Nice to meet you, AKA Rockin' Robin!
05:43Over here in our kitchen, we knew that we needed a space for our characters to hang out and refuel,
05:48so we kind of repurposed what is essentially like the machine shop of our radio station.
05:54And this is another place where our set deck team shines and our graphics team really shines.
06:00We will literally go and buy a lot off of eBay of original 40-year-old cheese puffs, cheese curls.
06:09And when that is not possible, we always make sure that we recreate our boxes accurately.
06:17We had another very specific scripted element where our gang needed to have a secret hideout.
06:22We have this mechanical room that you enter into, and it doesn't go anywhere.
06:28This door goes back out into the first floor,
06:31but we needed a secret door to get us into the gang's secret lair in the basement,
06:35so we came up with this idea.
06:42And voila, our entry into the basement set.
06:46We were able to build from the ground up the entire exterior radio station,
06:57which was a massive undertaking.
06:59And we even built the bottom 60 feet of the transmission tower
07:03because it factors in pretty heavily into the action.
07:16I just wanted to take a quick minute to show you guys the upper portions of our radio tower,
07:22which we have here on stage.
07:24As you can see, we've built the middle and top of our towers all out of steel.
07:31Our actors are climbing up them in these very intense climactic scenes.
07:35And again, you can see we're covering the towers with vines
07:38because of course we have to have our tower in the upside down
07:41as well as in the right side up.
07:46So now we're in the Hawkins Lab basement tank lab.
07:55Conspicuously absent is our tank.
07:57We are actually in the process of running special effects tests on it
08:01because, you know, naturally we have to blow the glass out of it
08:04and have water flood out into our set.
08:06As you can see, we are in the upside down for the first time in Hawkins Lab basement.
08:11These are our tried and true vines.
08:14This is a medium vine. These are our little vines.
08:17Essentially the core of these is just a pool noodle, like what you would play with in the summertime.
08:21And inside that there's a metal wire armature that allows them to be manipulated.
08:26And then around the outside, we wrap a sort of resin soaked fabric that then gets painted with tinted rubberized paints,
08:34which create this kind of permanent shine and make them very cleanable, which is essential because film sets get very dirty and dusty.
08:42Additionally, here you can see our scenic department comes and this very essential finishing touch to making the vines feel like they are actually growing on the surfaces.
08:53Might be time to get a maid, Wheeler.
09:00And I think at some point our special effects department told me that we had just hundreds of miles of vines.
09:07Evidently, we actually were a big boon to the pool noodle industry generally,
09:11and maybe one specific manufacturers of pool noodles are still around today because of the upside down vines.
09:21As 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.
09:32So it may not seem like the realest 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.
09:42That's what really brings it to life.
09:46Oh, shit. That's not good.
10:02We are in the hallways of Hawkins Lab.
10:12It's been part of the show since the very beginning of the series.
10:15This season, the lab is in the upside down and it's in a very uniquely supernatural state.
10:21So one of our biggest challenges this season was trying to figure out how do we represent a building melting in a supernatural way.
10:30And to that end, we arrived at this. The building is sort of melting from the top down.
10:35We designed our hallways in a way where as you're progressing through the sets, the melt is getting more and more severe.
10:42So one of the things that was exciting for us this season was that we are going to be able to finally build Hawkins Lab on stage.
10:49And previously, we've had to work within the confines of the practical location.
10:53And it was important to us that we be faithful to the practical location that we've all come to know and love.
11:00All of the architectural conditions are a dead match to the location, only obviously with the added surreal madness of the melt.
11:09If you look out here, we have what's called a brisole panel, which is essentially these giant metal panels.
11:16They'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.
11:27And we were fortunate enough to be able to harvest the actual panels from our location, which sadly has been demolished.
11:36We spent months drawing and playing with different materials and trying to decide how are we going to create these big organic shapes.
11:44All 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.
12:00And I was particularly interested in references of these sort of bubbling natural mud pits that you see in different places in the world.
12:07So 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.
12:14We 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.
12:22So 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.
12:30Oftentimes, you know, camera, the director, cinematographer, they want to get something interesting in the foreground.
12:35To 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.
12:46Because 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.
12:54So 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.
13:11Thought 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.
13:18We have a scene in which a couple of our characters are trapped inside a room and the walls start to actively melt.
13:24This is the after version of that set where everything has dried and the day is saved.
13:30But 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.
13:43This is the set that corresponds to the solidified melty goo set.
13:48Up there you can see that 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.
13:58Prior to this season, we've only seen Hawkins Lab roof from aerial shots.
14:10This season, it was essential that we'd be able to get up on the roof.
14:14And this I think is a really excellent example of the things that I enjoy the most in terms of the creative construction of this stuff.
14:23It's equally impressive to me as a designer that we have craftspeople who can carve these beautiful surreal sculptures.
14:31And 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.
14:43I 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.
14:58We'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.
15:15And you can see the cataclysmic rift situation of season four left the town in shambles.
15:22Our building facades here, we directly one for one recreated our downtown block from location in Jackson, Georgia.
15:31And now the military has gone to great lengths to create an access port into the upside down.
15:43My 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.
15:52Oftentimes 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.
16:03This architectural arch we have here that is a giant supernatural membrane gate into the upside down.
16:10So 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.
16:21All 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.
16:37And we are always working within the realm of budgetary realities.
16:42We essentially bought and reclad and purpose fit all of these old shipping containers with military hardware.
16:50And 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.
17:00That is essentially allowing VFX to extend the world of Hawkins beyond our backlogs.
17:08We knew that quite a lot of our business here was going to be at night.
17:11And we always collaborate very closely with the camera department, with the lighting department to figure out what's going to kind of work best for everybody.
17:17So 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.
17:32And we knew we wanted Hummers. Hummers were actually fairly new to the middle 80s and all of the accoutrement on the Hummer.
17:38All 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.
17:47Way back in the beginning of Stranger Things, we actually ended up landing on Jackson, Georgia, because the architecture as it existed was still pretty damn near a time capsule.
17:57So we had to obviously redress windows, we had to add some details to the facades.
18:02Over 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.
18:10Stranger Things has to pay homage to the electronics giant of the 80s, Radio Shack.
18:15It briefly moved over to the mall, but actually this season we get to kind of bring it back and they're reopening in downtown Hawkins.
18:22The Radio Shack. If we move quick enough, I think we can make it.
18:25Get in for the tunnels and get the hell out of here.
18:31Stranger Things has always been especially gratifying as a production designer and in so many ways is the type of project you dream of.
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