We’re heading to the Upside Down once again this year, but not in the way we’re used to – yes, Stranger Things will be getting its very own stage play, called Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and it will receive its world premiere in late 2023 at the Phoenix Theatre in London’s West End!

Based on an original story by the Duffer Brothers, Jack Thorne and Kate Trefry, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is a new play written by Kate Trefry, and will be directed by Stephen Daldry with co-direction by Justin  Martin, with The Duffer Brothers acting as creative producers.

 “We are beyond excited about Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” Matt and Ross Duffer said. “Collaborating with the brilliant Stephen Daldry has been nothing short of inspiring, and Kate Trefry has written a play that is at turns surprising, scary, and heartfelt.

“You will meet endearing new characters, as well as very familiar ones, on a journey into the past that sets the groundwork for the future of Stranger Things. We’re dying to tell you more about the story but won’t – it’s more fun to discover it for yourself. Can’t wait to see you nerds in London!”

Check out the official synopsis of the play below…

Hawkins, 1959: a regular town with regular worries. Young Jim Hopper’s car won’t start, Bob Newby’s sister won’t take his radio show seriously and Joyce Maldonado just wants to graduate and get the hell  out of town. When new student Henry Creel arrives, his family finds that a fresh start isn’t so easy…  and the shadows of the past have a very long reach.

Brought to life by a multi-award-winning creative team, who take theatrical storytelling and stagecraft  to a whole new dimension, this gripping new adventure will take you right back to the beginning of the  Stranger Things story – and may hold the key to the end.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow will be directed by Stephen Daldry with co-director Justin  Martin, set design by Miriam Buether, costume design by Brigitte Reiffenstuel, lighting design by Jon Clark, sound design by Paul Arditti, illusions design by Jamie Harrison & Chris Fisher, video design by  59 Productions, movement direction by Coral Messam, wigs, hair and make-up design by Campbell  Young Associates, casting by Charlotte Sutton CDG, international casting consultancy by Jim  Carnahan, Gary Beestone for Gary Beestone Associates is Technical Director, with further creative  team members to be announced.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow will go on sale this spring, details of which will be announced later this month. Priority access to tickets will be given to fans who register from today at: strangerthingsonstage.com

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We spoke to Barrie Gower, Makeup Effects Department Head about creating Vecna’s look…

How did you begin in makeup effects?

When I was growing up my dad was a manager of the Odeon Cinema and he used to take me to press screenings for films. I got to meet Ray Harryhausen when I was about six years old, so I was being nurtured into filmmaking at an early age!

In my early teens, I got into Fangoria magazine and into all the monster making and got really interested in makeup effects. I was very arty and into building things and had my own little amateur makeup box at home that I used to stick latex and stuff! While my friends would be outside playing football I’ll be covering myself in Latex and all kinds of rubbish [haha].

I went to art school and I knew I wanted to pursue this as a career but I was a local boy in the Midlands and was wondering how on earth would I get into this. Then I just stumbled across the prospectus for a course at the London College of Fashion who did Theatre, TV and film makeup. It was makeup and hair, but they had a prosthetics module on the course as well. So I got in to do that as two-year course and got taught by several industry professionals. When I graduated from that course I went to work at the BBC.

There was a visual effects department back in the day – this is sort of mid-90s – and I was working on a whole range of projects, from Red Dwarf to Silent Witness. I got to work for a few of the other prosthetic designers at the time. It’s a tiny little community in London. There’s probably a handful of companies that do what we do.

Then I worked for an incredible creature designer called Nick Dudman on the Harry Potter series, and spent about ten years working for Nick as well as other productions. Then towards the end of that I started doing my own projects. I had a little studio in my back garden and started doing a few projects for makeup designers and producers. I worked with a makeup designer called Jane Walker on The World’s End and a few months after that she was approached about joining Game of Thrones.

At the time, I was just doing odds and sods in my garage and my wife Sarah and I we were like ‘let’s just go for it’ and I went for the interview and somehow accidentally landed the gig!

We didn’t really have a workshop or a company. We started from the ground up and hired a workshop and built all the benches, hired all the equipment and pulled together a little team. This was halfway through Game of Thrones, in season four we joined, and that was it really. That was our first main project and it’s just taken off since then, so we’ve been really fortunate.

What was it like working on Game Of Thrones?

We were lucky because we were given the responsibility to design a lot of the creatures from scratch. I think the Night King was the first character we designed and then the following season there were loads of zombie characters. It was a really big undertaking.

I think it was season six that was a bit of a highlight for us because we created the prosthetics for some characters called The Children of the Forest. They were these sort of imp-like, foresty, female characters. They were just covered in prosthetics from head to toe, so they were pretty full-on makeups.

We had, I think, five characters, and we had five teams of four or five female prosthetic artists working on these characters each day, and their makeups took about seven or eight hours to apply in the morning. So we were starting around 1am and getting them ready for about 8am. Then we’d go on set, film with them all day, and finish about 6/7pm on the evening, then take them all out of the makeups and start again the following day.

So they were quite hardcore, full-on days. But they were probably the more memorable characters on Game of Thrones for us, but we were very lucky. There was a really wide range of characters and quite a good mix on the show for us.

How did you first get involved with Stranger Things?

We got approached by the Duffer brothers and one of the producers Iain Paterson. They approached us, I think, primarily because they were fans of our work on Game of Thrones and HBO’s Chernobyl had just come out as well. I think they were big fans of the radiation burn victims that we did on that, that we created with the makeup designer, Daniel Parker.

With the concept and the idea of Vecna, I think the overall feel had a similar feel and look to the textures and finishes of these radiation burns, as well. They approached us and they already had some concept work, some illustrations already designed by a wonderful concept artist Michael Mayer, so we already had blueprints.

They didn’t have an actor in mind at the time but they shared the concept with us and we had a lot of discussions about whether we would be approaching it from a purely prosthetic makeup point of view, or if it’d be a man in a rubber suit – they’d had a few experiences in the past with doing those sorts of things which weren’t necessarily that successful.

They cast Jamie Campbell Bower, I think it was in January 2020 and we did a full body life cast of Jamie and then we worked closely with Michael’s concept artist and augmented the design a little bit to fit over Jamie’s form. Then we sculpted Vecna’s makeup in modelling clay, and had to separate the sculpture up into lots of many different pieces. We created moulds for those which we then injected silicone rubbers and foam latex rubbers into. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, like a patchwork quilt of prosthetics and it’s about 25 pieces in total which all overlap each other.

We then did a couple of makeup tests, we did one in the UK with Jamie, and we had all the appliances which weren’t fully artworked, but we just glued everything onto him for him to get a feel for the weight and the process it was going to involve. And for us to make sure that everything conformed and fitted him correctly as well.

We had his mechanical hand built as well which had long aluminium finger extensions, which was all built into a glove that went onto his hand. Then had a foam latex sleeve which went over the top of that.

So it was the logistics of figuring out the time it was going to take to get all this glued on to Jamie. The process and figuring out a pattern with our team of who was going to be responsible for applying what where. It’s almost like an orchestrated dance that you do with this little team to try and fit your way around Jamie to get it all done in the quickest possible way!

Then we had a final makeup test and camera tests with him in the November of that year and we started building in January. Then we obviously all went into lockdown in the March, so we closed down for three months, and came back to the studio in June, and continued with Stranger Things. We had a couple of other projects on at the same time but Stranger Things was the first project we came back with. We had a full camera test in the November of 2020 and we went out to Atlanta to do the test. About three or four days later was our first shoot day with Jamie and that was for the sequence at the end of Episode Two, where Vecna kills Fred, the guy in the grave. That was the first scene we ever shot with Vecna.

How long did it take to put on the Vecna makeup?

The first makeup test was about eight and a half hours to get it all on him, figuring everything out with a team of four people. Then eventually as we got into the application day after day after day, we got it down to about six hours 20 was our quickest time but it averaged about seven hours.

I think we put Jamie in the makeup on maybe about 20 occasion all in all but the production was fantastic. We worked very closely with one of the producers who was also first AD, Tudor Jones who did the global schedule for Stranger Things and he scheduled it very well knowing the hours that Jamie and ourselves would be doing. So we never shot two days back to back. It would always be a day on, day off, day on… To be honest that’s rare. It was very well paced throughout the shoot, they were very very clever with that.

It was a four-man team and it became super slick in the end that we all had to be in the right place at the right time. Jamie always had his arm up at the right time. We started with him standing up, then sitting down, lying on his front, lying on his back. It was a well-oiled machine in the end!

Stranger Things Season 4 Vol. 2 is on Netflix now. 

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The post Stranger Things Series 4 Vol 1 Review: A darker side of Hawkins appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Electric guitars at the ready because we’re heading back to the Eighties and to the Upside Down as the Stranger Things trailer for Season Four is revealed.

Watch it here…

Series Four of Stranger Things takes place six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time – and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.

Created by The Duffer Brothers, the series stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Cara Buono and Matthew Modine.

Stranger Things 4, Volume 1 premieres on May 27, on Netflix and Stranger Things 4, Volume 2 premieres on July 1, on Netflix.

The post Stranger Things: A war is coming in the trailer for Season Four appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Read that letter here…

Series Four of Stranger Things takes place six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time – and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.

Now, we have more snippets from the next series with the first set of images, which you can find in our gallery below…

Stranger Things 4, Volume 1 premieres on May 27, on Netflix and Stranger Things 4, Volume 2 premieres on July 1, on Netflix.

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