Stranger Things / Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down

UP IN THE AIR
 
It s one of the most eye-popping displays of Eleven s amazing powers: as the young heroes are pursued by Brenner and his bad men through the streets of Hawkins, the gifted girl stares down a white van coming straight toward Mike and her and sends it soaring overhead. The vehicle crashes to the street below, blocking the pursuers path and allowing the kids to escape. Special effects coordinator Caius Man explains how he helped Eleven make the van fly:
 
From our standpoint, it really wasn t that supremely complicated. A flying car is a flying car. There were some unusual aspects to that because of the unnatural way they wanted it to fly, where it lifted sort of straight up and then tipped forward, so it took a little engineering. But it worked when we did it.
 
We actually physically fired a van. We towed one down the street, and the van had in it two nitrogen cannons, two nitrogen sleeves that fired a high-density plastic slug out of the bottom of them to push it up into the air. One was just hitting a little harder than the other, which is what resulted in it going end over end the way it was supposed to.
 
We built a small test in our shop. Basically, we built a plywood van with a couple of pneumatic cylinders, and we hopped it around the shop a bunch of times and were satisfied that it was going to function. [The Duffers]
wanted to see a full-size version of it to make sure that we could get it sufficiently high [so that they] could composite the children on the bicycles underneath it. What we did is, we shot it in the air, and then we had the kids ride down the street with the camera in the same position. Then we just cropped the two images together. We didn t shoot the van over kids. That would be insane.
 
We took it to a parking lot a similar van, not exactly the same van to a parking lot at Screen Gems, at our studio, and shot it. It launched, and everybody was excited. It landed exactly where I

Gina McIntyre is a veteran entertainment journalist who has covered movies, TV, and music for the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and Entertainment Weekly. She is the author of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water: Creating a Fairy Tale for Troubled Times and The Art of Ready Player One. Her writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone online. She lives with her husband and daughter in Riverside, Illinois.

Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer are film and television writers, directors, and producers, as well as twin brothers. They are the creators of Stranger Things, which has won five Emmys as well as awards from the Producers Guild of America and the American Film Institute.