Channeling great classics from the ’80s like Stephen King’s Stand by Me and Spielberg’s E.T, the Duffer Brothers created Stranger Things. The Netflix original series debuted last year and has been collecting faithful followers ever since. The sci-fi horror tale authentically recaptures the look and feel of the ’80s not only because we can see kids playing Dungeons & Dragons rather than being updating their social media status, but also because production designer Chris Trujillo was able to successfully create a world of fantasy inside our very own real world. Stranger Things production design work is one of the most well-accomplished designs in modern television (or ‘streaming service’ if you prefer it), and you are about to fall in love with it.
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Shooting was done in Atlanta, something that quite pleased production designer Chris Trujillo, seeing as it was easier to capture the 1980s feeling. The city is filled with mid-century houses suburban neighborhoods, so all he had to do to get a good approximation of the period was remove some cars, satellite dishes, manicure the lawns, switch out a few mailboxes, and fill the driveways with period correct station wagons and sedans.
For the Byers house, Trujillo decided to go with the same set for the real-world and Upside Down environments. This meant the production design team had to continuously dress and redress the set! They spent a lot of time working out the science of the Upside Down. “Essentially, at the moment that the rift was formed and interacted the monster, this dark dimension overlaps with the Hawkins’ world and it gets inflected with the vines and the spores,” he said.
“With the Beyer house, there was the added fun of building to accommodate an invading monster and a mother with an axe and Christmas lights, coming unhinged, tearing the place apart in an attempt to communicate with her son trapped in another dimension. Also, we had to do a version of it completely covered in the membranous tentacles and slime of the Upside Down.”
“One of the secrets to creating the ever important “life layer” on a set is fastidious estate sale pillaging. Every weekend in the suburbs outside big cities there are time capsules being opened up for the discerning decorator to dig through. One dead man’s junk drawer is another man’s period-perfect set dressing.”
“When we found the Beyer house exterior there was no question in anyone’s mind that it was exactly what we were looking for: a ramshackle old house built between the wars, clad in grey-blue faux-wood asbestos siding, across the tracks, at the end of a grim gravel drive, pressed up against the woods on the far edge of town,” said production designer Chris Trujillo.
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