Emphasising the growing epic scale of the storytelling by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer is Netflix dividing Season 4 of Stranger Things into two parts, with Episode 409 clocking in at a feature length runtime of two hours and 20 minutes. There were three visual effects supervisors with Michael Maher Jr. overseeing Episodes 401 to 406 while Episodes 407 to 409 were looked after by Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates. Among the 30 VFX vendors producing over 4,000 shots was Scanline VFX supervisor Justin Mitchell who created 220 shots, half of which were for the season finale. The major work was devoted to environmental enhancements and set extensions as well as effects simulations.
“I didn't work on in previous seasons but it was definitely a much bigger budget [$30 million per episode] this time around,” states Justin Mitchell. “It meant that we were able to push things further and do some cooler things more on the scale of a tentpole feature film, like opening up big rifts through the landscape, and having trees and buildings fall into them.” Having three different visual effects supervisors did alter somewhat the post-production dynamics. “We had to get to know some new people and understand what they were and all of the language which comes with that.”
