Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the tech are you?
So?
Yesterday we published an episode called Lighting Up the Holidays that originally published back in twenty nineteen. Today, I'm going to do one from twenty seventeen. This is a rerun of an episode called The Tech of Stranger Things. It's still somewhat thematic because we have a discussion about holiday lights in this episode as well. Jess Royle and John
Hilton were guests on this episode. Both of them had worked on the set of Stranger Things, and yeah, it was a great discussion about the technical issues that go on to making a show like Stranger Things work, particularly a show that's set in an earlier era, that being the nineteen eighties, and trying to make sure that everything feels genuine. It's actually tricky because, as you are aware, most of us don't hold on to our technology for
that long. Making sure we have the right tech is tricky. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode The Tech of Stranger Things,
which originally published October twenty fifth, twenty seventeen. I have to thank my two special guests who have joined me for this episode of Tech Stuff, Jess and John, who both have worked on multiple projects, but the one we're talking about specifically today is the Netflix series Stranger Things, a show that I binged immediately when the first season came out and fell in love with it, not just because I recognized some of the people in it, but
because it really felt to me like it didn't feel like a show set in the nineteen eighties. It felt like a show that was made in the nineteen eighties and somehow disappeared and then resurfaced twenty years later, and it's it's so evocative, and I wanted to have both of you on to talk about your roles in making
this show what it was. So we're gonna talk today about sort of the tech side, the behind the scenes side of making a show and the work that you do and how that ends up contributing to this overall effect whatever the show may be or the movie, whatever the project is. In this case, we're talking about something that is a period piece. But you know, obviously there are other ones where you have a very different feel
for whatever the project is. So I'm going to start with you, John, John, you are rigging gaffer.
Ye.
Tell listeners who have seen I'm sure the term gaffer in the credits what that means, because I think I think a lot of folks just don't know.
The gaffer is just a department head that's in charge of the electrical so electrical distribution and lighting. I think the term comes from old man. Yeah, he was the old man on the crew. He's in charge of the lighting.
Yeah. They have a the term gaffer in and lord of the rings. Actually, Sam Wise Gamgee's father is called the old gaffer. I say that because of my Lord of the rings geek. So what are your responsibilities.
Typically on a shoot as a ring gaffer?
I provide the power to the set and any any lighting that we can get up before beforehand before photography, We'll get that done as well.
Cool, So you are making sure that all the stuff that needs to work is actually going to work. Yes, an important role on any production. And how did you get your start in the business known as show I was.
A nanny for a director of photography in nineteen ninety eight the summer of ninety eight, and I watched his kids during a summer and after at the end of summer, he had me tag along with him to go work on a film. And after the film, he was.
Like, oh, you'd be great at this. You should move to LA I got my friends.
They can hook you up at a camera rental house and you can do that for a little while. And I was like, I don't want to do that. I want to move to New York City and be a bum. So I didn't get into it right away. I was a maintenance man in an apartment complex and all my tools were stolen.
Oh why, And I was like, I'll go work on movies now.
A secure circuitus rude to get there. So did you have a background in electrical work before you even got into the movie?
A little bit?
And I've done like my dad does HVAC, So I kind of dabbled on that and doing the whole and it's for apartment complex thing. I kind of understood electrical systems, right.
So you then take that understanding and you start pouring it over to the production side, where I imagine it's.
A a fairly.
Strenuous process to make sure everything is how it needs to be because Obviously, any time on any set is money, So anything that takes extra time is going to cost the whole production extra amounts of money. So I mentioned this a fairly high stress environment.
It is.
Yeah, I don't get a lot of sleep. I always called Jesse workaholic, but really it's me. I do it all at home. She doesn't see it.
It's fair now, Jess, you you were a set decorator. Are still our sex decorator for Stranger Things. Also, congratulations on getting an Emmy nomination for that work.
Thank you.
That's amazing. This first time I think I've ever sat down onto the table with an Emmy nominee.
Wow.
Yeah, it's It's a big moment for me. It's what I'm saying. So let's talk about what that means. What does what is actually set decorator on a set?
So I work under the production designer, and the production designer kind of sets the look like, helps pick locations and then you know, has a lot of references and different things as far as the minutia of how a set comes together. There's an art director who kind of oversees more of the construction end of things, and then
everything from like those four walls. For the most part, I kind of deal with so light fixtures and you know, carpet and sofas and electronics and all the garbage and some sets and piles up in the clutter.
That's my specialty.
So when a when the art department has said, like, oh, we've got this idea for what the the feel for this particular set needs to be. Uh, it's your job to go and actually procure all that, put it all together, make sure that it's matching the vision for whatever that idea was. Right, Yes, And on a production that's a period piece, I imagine that also involves lots of hunting around for really obscure and obsolete stuff.
It does.
I spend a lot of time and I always tell everyone dead ladies, basements of state sales. I'm always like emptying out the leftovers of houses, you know, after a state sales over and you know, and Stranger Things is one of those weird shows, especially where everything's a little bit interactive kind of which is why that's why I wanted John to be here, because he's I think he sold himself short a little bit as far as like just preparing or providing power to a set because we
had so many interactive elements, you know, lights and otherwise that kind of had to be period and had to be functional and do a bunch of different things.
So yeah, a good example that would be, of course, the Christmas lights make play a huge role in that season of Stranger Things. I mean, it's a communications device, and I don't know how many of my listeners know this. Christmas lights don't work that way. Typically, you have them all rigged up so that if one goes out, they
all tend to go out, especially the period ones. So getting them so that they very they light up in very specific ways probably meant a little bit of rewiring work and a little bit of rigging things in an interesting way so that you could get to do it on command. That was such an important integral part of the storyline. I remember.
I remember when they came and asked me. They were walking through the buyer's house set. It was Chris and Jess and Todd, and they were like, we want to make each light go off and individually. Is it possible?
Yes?
And I turned around and I walked back in my little office and I was like, oh no, how am I going to make this?
For like technically yes, it's possible. Practical not really, So how did you go about solving that problem?
I just started scribbling a lot and locked my door.
And just trying to figure out how to get lights to go on and off individually, which means the way had to build individual strands of lights. So I ended up, I guess it's kind of low tech. We're kind of getting a low tech as possible. So I ended up using Cat five cable and taking all the different strands and making them individual and soldering them into old Christmas lights that Jess would bring us Wow.
So you were actually hand designing something so that you
could achieve this effect in a practical approach. It's one of the other things, by the way, that I love about Stranger Things being I was born in the seventies, So seeing not just something that is set and appears to have been made in the eighties, but to rely so heavily upon practical effects that warms my heart because I grew up watching films that relied heavily on practical effects, and I think it is very important to get across that same feel in order to get the effect that
you want and not rely too heavily on anything. That's computer generated. Not to dismiss computer generator, it certainly has a place in storytelling, but to me at least, and maybe this is my own bias, has it just has a different look in a different feel, you know, there's something genuine about practical effects.
And not all of ours went. We had different test runs that the Duffers forward they kill if any of those videos ever got out. Some of the ones that didn't work as well, with like the monster coming through our latex we have you know, printed the wallpaper and stuff in the buyer's house onto latex. We had all these different tests we did with various you know, slimy
substances and things on. Anyway, they didn't all It took a while to kind of get that just tweaked, you know, just right right the face.
Like kind of pushing through the surface of the wall.
And originally they had him breaking through the wall entirely. They're trying to do it all practical, and I think it's nice to have technology options where VFX could just take what we did and really enhance it.
And you know, right yeah, eventually you get to a point where you just say, you know, physics just doesn't work that way. Yeah, I like, I appreciate where you're trying to go with this. Yeah, I love that there was a latex approach a practical approach with that too, because I mean I also, full disclosure, my sister's a puppeteer, so I see the puppeteer side of sort of this
kind of stuff all the time. And to appreciate practical effects where you're using something like a latex sheet and you're using some form of whether it's an actor, a mask, a puppet, or whatever, to create that effect. I mean, there is something really visceral and the textures are really impressive.
It's something that goes again beyond just that, Oh, that's a very clever animation, and also that just shows a level of care that you know, you have to have all of that work back behind the scenes to get that effect to happen on screen. That is happening in real time somewhere. It's not a bunch of people staring at a green wall pretending that they see something that is really effective and then having to react to nothing at all. They actually have stuff to react to in
those practical effects. I am not an actor that's good enough to react to a green screen and make that at all convincing. I need to have some sort of monster thing coming at me so that I can really, you know, be somewhat convincing in my response.
And The Christmas Lives is the same thing, because we you know, I think it looked a lot more authentic and better to have it practical. But even there's like the scene where Holly the young Wheeler daughters like following the Christmas lights down the hallway, and I think if we didn't have all of those actually lighting up in her having that direction and sort of all the interaction you know with the lights and actors, it wouldn't have been the same.
No, you wouldn't be able to get that tension. Yeah, that's a great moment, So tell me also, I mean the Christmas lights. I think that's one of those that I that I definitely wanted to hit upon because it's a deceptively simple technology that ends up actually requiring thinking outside the box in order to get the effect they wanted, so requiring you to actually solder things.
Weeks weeks weeks of soldering.
Wow, So if you had to estimate, like how many weeks are you talking about for that, just to make sure you could get that effect to work properly.
It was two two weeks.
That's I mean, that's a lot of work to get Christmas lights the light up.
I think we only built out of the twenty that we were going to build, we only built seventeen because that's all we had time to do on top of everything else that we had to do.
Oh sure, yeah, yeah, So.
Because then they would so they would solder these little strands, you know, onto the sockets, and then we had it involved me going back to props the lights that Joyce originally buys at Melvald's Props. I guess it just sort of had newer lights in the box and wasn't really thinking about the bigger picture. So we had to go back and have switched those out for the older strands that have like the green and red twisted.
Sort of look right so that we could.
That that was the easiest thing for us to copy. So they would finish soldering and then we would paint them green and red and twist them all together.
You know. So there's like a whole there's a whole collaborative effort.
Serious continuity right there making sure that like because I mean, I see a lot of movies where clearly that that level of care was not quite take and you'll look at something and think like, that's not even the same prop as what he was holding a second ago. So having that kind of level of detail is really cool. So I assumed there was someone just like actually just manually operating those lights.
Yeah, for all those sequences, we had our dimmer board operator Jim and doornoman uh huh. He programmed all that.
And operate in real Tumbrad in real time. Wow.
He's another one of my heroes too, because these guys, because it wasn't because the Christmas lights were one thing. And then there's also like the scene with the lamps in the bedroom and Winona having to you know, bring I guess we never had a scene. At first they were going to show her like bringing all the lamps in and setting them up.
And that was going to be like a whole other nightmare.
But once they were sort of you know, they are just getting those programmed right to do that effect. Jim stayed late with me one night and just like we did, you know, kept practicing and getting all that down.
So see, to me, that's really cool because it's not just technical. It's it's a level of performance. I mean, you're playing effectively another character in the scene, and so you know, there's all the timing that's required in that to and again to get what the director wants in order for that to have the emotional and psychological impact on the viewer, which, by the way, credibly effective.
Because I loved it.
So you know, my hat's off to you, because I occasionally am a performer, but I couldn't do any of the rest of it, whereas you guys are doing all of that. So I'm really I'm really impressed. I assume that it's is pretty tricky outfitting entire sets with nineteen eighties era carbeting, furniture, the technology in particular, because we're not so far removed from the nineteen eighties that we
think of those things as antiques. So therefore there's not a lot of work and preserve preserving them, but we're far enough out where nobody wants to hold onto them anymore. So was was that a challenge to you to find things that could incorporate that could live in that early eighties setting?
Not as hard as you would think, I think, mostly just because thank God for State sales and Atlanta being a good a state sales city. I've worked in other cities where you just don't you know, they just don't operate like that, you know. I don't know how people get rid of their stuff after they've passed. I don't know, but Atlanta is good about it. There are other like
I've done other movies. I did a movie that it was a news station set in the seventies, and that's one of those like there's already not a ton of like news broadcast station equipment out there, not like you know, old Nintendos and things, but and then it.
Was so fragile.
It was sort of that like just that first wave of like electronic technology and the old analog stuff from like the fifties was you can get that kind of stuff, but that's but getting stuff that worked that was That's sort of that. That first generation plastic electronic disposable almost
like technologies was harder. But fortunately for you know, Sears catalog days, a lot of Americans all had the same stuff, and enough people held onto it her pack rats that we could kind of curate and go through and find everything we needed.
Yeah, I went to a panel with the art director from Stranger Things, and he talked a little bit about the process of identifying the different the different types of fabrics and the different color schemes that were going to be important, and how you know, certain certain houses were going to look like they were more of a holdover from maybe the mid to late seventies and some were a little bit more modern in the sense of the
early eighties. And and that also was really interesting to me, this idea of you know, you're not just you're not just creating creating a huge pile of stuff from a general era. You actually have to give each of these places its own personality.
Well that's yeah, there is a I tell people the story that one of our accountants came to me after we were like up and filming the first week or so on stage, and she said, you know, Jess, I saw your sets. They look really great, but gosh, like is this this is the eighties and they look very seventies to me? And I was, you know, and it's one of those like not every socioeconomic group is going to just instantly have you know, the late eighties. Yeah,
from like that series catalog that year. It's all it's more of a you know, when did they build the house, When would they have you know, renovated or what's there? You know, did they have the means to update the carpet, wallpaper, whatever, And kind of have to just think it through each character having its own sort of storyline with their home.
Yeah, keeping everything consistent. I mean that is clearly very important if you want to establish things, like, you know, a believable character. It would be weird to go into a home of a person who was presumably just scraping by and you see what appears to be a brand new Apple two gs in the background. You're like, that's a couple of grand Where did they get that money for that?
They?
Yeah?
Yeah.
So was there anything in particular that you either of you that you think was really interesting or really cool? Uh, something that you had not anticipated? Uh that you know, that's like your go to, Like, you know, if people were asking you, what was it, like, You're like, well, let me tell you this particular thing that I was really excited about, whether it was something that turned out the way you expected at the beginning or something that completely went a different direction.
Getting getting invited back to season two, that was that's good.
That's good.
I think if you were able to take all of those Christmas lights and make them light up individually, that's a really good start.
I don't know, I don't.
I mean that's what I was thrilled to be here today and asked John to come too, because for me, that sort of like collaborative overlap my thing. And he
knows as well. Is it like today in film, Like everyone loves led lights lighting, even if they're trying to make even if it is like period or they want it to look you know, period, they still kind of fall back on LEDs because they're easier to control and sure, and I kind of hate them, so I mean, I'm coming around to some of them, but anyway to have them, to have our electrical department have the patients to kind of like really do it right and work with the
older technology, and you know that that was a it was a long process.
But the fluorescent fixtures lots.
Oh yeah, that's another.
Fluorescence because they're period of course, and hardly anyone stocks fluorescent ballast. We had to replace hundreds of ballasts well in high schools and Melvolves and all over Georgia we replaced ballast.
Wow, that's a big undertaking that was awful. Yeah, but it pays off on screen because it does give you that like like that's why it feels like it was made in the eighties, is because it has all of this love and care behind it, and you can see that rolling out through other projects that are clearly following that same philosophy. I mean, Stephen King's it coming out, like, I think the look of it owes an awful lot to Stranger Things. It has a very similar kind of
feel to it for that Segod. I mean, it's amazing to me that they went ahead and decided to set the adult story in modern day, which conveniently made the children's story set in the eighties, and so there are a lot of parallels there. But it's funny because of course Stranger Things also, you could tell has a little bit of the influence of Stephen King is certainly in the Stranger Things universe as well, So it's all kind of feeding in on itself. It's a collaborative and cooperative
as well as competitive process. I'm sure. So were there any particular sets that you really liked working on or any that you really did not like working on?
I don't, John, I probably will have different responses. But I mean the buyer's house is one of the I tell everyone, it's like its own sort of character that we had. You know, it's at least we shot it in a for the most part, chronological order, because we really literally destroyed it completely as we went and you know,
Joyce ripping things apart and monsters smashing things. And I will say it was it was towards the end of it when all the Christmas lights were up and like half pulled down, and it was an absolute nightmare for the shooting crew. I mean for a boom operator to operate in that setting was just like it's uh, you know, it's everyone was getting like tangled and it was. Yeah, it was truly like a it was a it was kind of fun to watch it progress, but it was
a it took a lot of patience. They're not not every shooting crew be cut out to kind of handle that that setting.
My least favorite was the high school because we had again we had to go in and replace every fluorescent, most of the ballast in there. And then towards the end of it, when they had the scene with Eleven and the monster, everything starts to go crazy and flickers we had to take everything out and we reinstalled our own LED strips throughout the school so it could make everything flicker on and off.
That's a lot of work, a lot of work.
And it wasn't even just led twobs. It was like they were soldering again. I just would see that, you know, you guys were.
On location soldering in some old classroom.
Putting LED strips in like twobs or whatever you were doing.
Yeah, that was well, what was what was it like working in Uh? Did they the facility? Wasn't that set in an old building in the emery?
Yeah? Hawkins Lab.
Yeah, how was that experience?
Uh?
I'm you know, there are a lot of shows that film there.
I feel like we were still in the early wave of like some of the shows that were like really working on all the different floors and stuff. So like especially John and having to go up and put you know, move ceiling tiles out of the way to run cable and stuff. Is like you're for the first time in forty years, you know, you.
Were you were you were the explorer that everyone else got the.
Benefit we found.
Yeah, Well, for people who don't know, can you talk a little bit about the building itself? Where the Hawkins Lab was because I think, you know, again, everyone sees it in the show, but they don't know what the actual space was. They might just think, oh, was that just a set on a studio, and in fact that parts of it at least were very much in a real building here in Atlanta.
Yeah, I will say, like when we were first when the Duffers were first here and we were going to you know, film Stranger Things in Atlanta, and full disclosure, I sometimes location scout when I'm not decorating.
It's like my secret job.
So so I was doing a lot of the like early scouting, trying to figure out what Hawkins Lab was going to be and how undercover and small it was going to be or how big and you know.
Just what the look was going to be. Yeah, and I did. We didn't all agree.
I felt like that building a memory with its metal facade and kind of craziness on the outside, was a little like ostentatious for a secret sort of government facility. But anyway, but they loved. I mean, it is a pretty impressive building and it's very distinct, and what they did with it in posts like putting the satellites and stuff on top it made it all kind of work. But yeah, it's a it's on Briarcliff here in Atlanta, and it's an old mental hospital and uh yeah, so
it's truly creepy. It's not everything works in there anymore. Powers like kind of like hit or miss in some areas, and a lot of leaks and things, lots of leaks.
Yeah, so it must have been a tough one to work in as well, John, did you do you have a lot of challenges going through all that.
I mean, it's just like that place they just stopped one day and everyone left and then people came in behind them and trashed the place. So there's broken glass everywhere, there were needles everywhere, and just trying to figure out what, like how to power how does this light come on? Where you have to trace it all the way down sometimes in the floor underneath you or the sub floor underneath you.
It was definitely a challenge.
Wow, So I'm sure that was one of the more difficult ones to actually to power make sure that everything was working properly. Yeah. I saw the pictures of sort of the before and after during one of those presentations, and.
It was really.
Really alarming. Actually, there was a shot that was just down a hallway and it was possibly the most creepy looking photograph I had seen in a really long time.
Well, the one thing I will say is that we'd every intention when we first started of shooting like the the sort of rift lab in Hawkins, like where the tank and everything is. That was the tunnels leading up to that and the opening scene where he's like getting off the elevator and everything. We were going to do that at Emory, which is they actually have these like underground tunnels that are that are.
It's pretty bad. I don't even know.
Yeah, it's like asbestos and all these like crazy you know, it's just it's dark there hasn't empowered down there forever. And so at the last minute, I think they'd done these like air quality tests and stuff, and they finally said there's okay, this is great. The texture is great, it's authentic, but we like, really we cannot film down here.
So we ended up copying the general look of it on our stage, and we built a series of tunnels that were a lot more easy to control from a lighting standpoint and every other aspects, right.
And you don't have to worry about breathing in Carcinogenic.
Yeah, we do that.
I feel like the like John and I and our crews that are there you know beforehand, so early working on places, especially those guys with like the ceiling tiles are the hidden that's what is above those is uh the real you know, there's yeah.
There's there's a whole treasure trove of exactly. Yeah, exciting.
So we deal with the worst of it and then I think shooting crew has a little better time.
By the time they get in there, it's all been cleaned up a little bit.
And then of course then you have you know, the very pampered people to actors, that's fantastic that they complain a little bit about it being a little chilly outside.
Like listen, when we came here.
There was no power, water was coming in, and there were rats everywhere.
So there's some sets like in season two which you know, who can kind of leave everyone to sort of experience later this month, but it's there is an arcade and just know, like when we finish all this, I'll show you the photos. But the before was like an old laundromat, dry cleaner place that had been sold, closed down, leaky roof, all the same stuff the hoarder had taken it over and it was like to the ceiling with like mattresses and diapers and like whatever garbage. And so that process
was another good one. We've had a lot stranger things. Is like people who hear about our production. I feel like who also shoot in Atlanta are like who he see and kind of know what we started out with and then what the final product is are like why you know your show is like does the craziest Like we're willing to put up with a lot more, I think than a lot of other like productions, Hollywood productions that you know, would never touch some of the places that we go into.
Yeah, well again it pays off though, So I look forward to seeing those photos because of course, again growing up in the seventies and eighties, I have a lot of fond memories of arcades that you just you know, you very rarely encounter those kind of places these days.
It's going to be another one of those like why would you put the effort into it? Like it's but it was just little architectural things about the building that we thought were kind of great and I don't know, well, every now.
And then you run into one of those places where you're just like, well, everything inside here is is trashed, but it's so evocative of that particular thing you're trying to do that you know, I'm sure it becomes one of those debates that rages in your mind, like is it going to be worth the amount of effort it's going to take to get this place into shape? And if the answer is yes, then you just have to grit your teeth and go for it and and you know, get the work done.
The library we had the Hawkins Library. Yeah, we another one of my really good ideas. There's a library in downtown East Point, Georgia that was it was like on the Places in Peril like Historic Preservation List.
It was.
It was leaky roof same thing, you know, asbestos mold, tons of tons of mold. They had standing water in the basement for like two years. And we had the big idea to spend I don't know how much we spent there with like a full like mold remediation and
abatement process. And then you know, John went in and fixed all the light fixtures, and we went in and put in you know, the bookcases, and I bought like twenty thousand books and library card catalogs, all that stuff just to you know, for really not at all much screen time, but you know, but you need a period library and you got to start somewhere. So we ended up actually donating I donated like the books and everything to the city eas point to stay intact there so
it can. It kind of gets now rented out as a location for other productions, and that money kind of goes into keeping the building up and they fixed the roof and everything, so so it's cool.
We saved it.
Yeah, there's there's a little nice little by product of the production. It's not just not just that you're making amazing entertainment, but that you can actually benefit well. And again this gets outside of tech, but we hear it all the time. I mean, there's always the discussion about the benefits of the film and television business moving into
any place. When you can hear about stories like that, you're like, that's something that I wouldn't necessarily have thought of, just from the fact that we're getting this influx of productions coming into Atlanta. For those who do not know, Atlanta is one of the cities in the United States that's really taking off when it comes to film and television and music video production.
And you know.
There's certain to a certain extent. Music video had been fairly big here for a while. Television some TV productions were shot in here. But we're seeing more and more film projects as well, largely because of the construction of the Pinewood Studio that's south of the city, and they're especially like just around the area that we're in right now. We're at Pont City Market in Atlanta. Around this general area, you can't go maybe a couple of miles in any
direction before you start seeing signs for various productions. They're everywhere, and so we're actually seeing some of that benefit now where we're seeing, you know, communities potentially get the reuse of buildings that otherwise would have been remaining vacant. From a similar perspective, although this wasn't from a film production, the building we're in right now was largely vacant for decades.
It was a Sears distribution center. Then for a while the city of Atlanta had about ten percent of this building and the other ninety percent was empty.
I picked up many police reports and things here, yeah, on.
The program, and you could get like art supplies and I used to come here and get art supplies.
Yeah.
Yeah, to the point where if you were to walk around all the different offices here, first of all, they'd ask you to leave, but if you were to do that, you would probably see a lot of old equipment, Like we have an old turbine in our lobby, And it's because every office was given some of the pieces of equipment that had been used when this was a big distribution center for sears. I mean it was built right on the railroad. They would actually bring railroad cars into
this place. So every office has some element of that worked into it. And it's again just one of those reminders of the history of the place that for decades went just completely unused. And this was literally just stuff that was piled up. So I guess it's kind of similar to what you do just where you have to you have to go into interesting places and just kind
of search around. I mean, there used to be a really great place very close to here that had crazy stuff for lots of antiques and a lot of old fixtures and things, and now it's a restaurant. And I'm always sad when I go by the Wrecking Bar. Yeah, I'm sad that that place is gone, because I would find really interesting stuff there. Yeah, but that was just for me. I don't decorate sets at all. So what
do you think out of it? Maybe not just stranger things, but anything any production you've worked on, was the the most interesting piece that you have ever found for a production?
Well, this.
The movie I was talking about that was took place in a television station. It was set in nineteen seventy four in Sarasota, Florida. And the director, I don't know if he completely understood. He's a little bit of a savante and wanted to have like a full working broadcast studio from that era.
They not just look like one, but actually.
Literally working, which yeah, exactly, monitors in a control room and cameras and all of it, and all the editing and and and this is all still like film and stuff. Yeah. And there was this one piece, a quadruplex machine. And this is like right when news gathering was like going electronic and so a lot of that technology was changing
like in the moment. But this quadruplex machine that looks like a giant kind of real to real thing that there were not that many of them, and there are really not that many of them left now, especially working, which is like a you know, they're so finicky, right. There was like a place in the Rhode Island that had some museum and a couple other places even like in La what i'd call the regular prop houses to ship it out here, that they didn't have any So
I just was calling old TV stations. Not that anyone has phones or answers their phone anymore anywhere. It's like an annoying another annoying landline thing.
But so I was just driving around.
We were filming in Savannah, and I was just driving like on the weekends to smaller towns that used to have news stations, just like looking for like that one place that has an attic or a basement that just dashed all the stuff.
And never threw it away.
And there was a guy in Macon at a TV station and he was like literally the only guy like manning like reruns of the Simpsons or whatever they're you know, like I don't even think they did news anymore. But he came to the door and I was asking him about like old equipment, and you know, he's like, well, we do have this old site out in the swamp that we used to use like as a studio, and I was like, do you think you have a quadruplex machine? And he's like, oh, yeah, I got that. I got
like two of those out there. And I was just like literally, yeah, that was like the best moment. And then so we get in this guy's truck when we ride out to the swamp and leaky roof, no power, you know, same thing we always are dealing with, but yeah, they're in the corner in like a dry corner.
Was like this quadruplex and a.
Bunch of other stuff that was really useful to have to we were able to kind of tinker and get it to work. And that was my that's by far my my like prize possession of all the things I've ever found.
Ye, I love it.
It's sort of the sort of challenges you don't necessarily anticipate until you encounter one of those A tour directors who has that that strong dependence upon authenticity.
I'm sick of control panels, Jess No, that's another yeah, Like season two is a yeah, you guys will see when that comes out, but there's a we did a whole control panel in the riff lab this time that we needed to be able to really control rather than like getting prop ones, which is kind of what we had the first season and something I was never really
that happy with. I had probably the bad idea of designing my very own control panel with all these separate like old boat led lights and indicator lights and all these different things that I was trying to get John in like really early last season to help start like figuring out how we were going to power each one and have each one on a separate control I was.
Told there would be no flickering season two because that was a big, a big expense for production.
Uh huh.
And then then you'll see.
The whole board is a flickering mess of like, yeah, it was.
Like I feel like I feel like a little bit of it has been spoiled for me. But I will go into it just knowing there may be a flicker or two in season two.
I don't know. I haven't seen any of the footage, so I'm not sure.
Yeah, maybe that all got cut.
I wasn't even there when it happened.
Yeah, that was kind of a nightmare.
And we've done all kinds of like even season one in the Quarry, which you would think like that's you know, probably not even that much from a set deck standpoint and there and there wasn't except they wanted to light some of that scene with search and rescue where they find Will's body or not real body, but you know, they wanted to light that practically, and so we needed a peer red whacker lights and just like the logistics of like me me finding the lights that were there,
right government auctions and show their go to and so we found something like Tennessee since sent transpot guys up there to go pick them up and bring them back. And then just John assessing that for the first time is a you know, this like archaic mess of wires and different things, and but he rewired those and they looked great on camera. Wow.
So it's it's kind of funny. I did an interview it's actually going to be the episode that follows this one, uh, with a guy who was hired to to write a full kind of like a workshop manual of the Ghostbusters technology. And he was given full access to all the different props and stuff. But it was his job to figure out not just what the stuff was, but what it used to be and how it actually works in real life, and then how was it in the mythology of Ghostbusters
altered so that it works for that? And he started looking at all the different pieces, like just imagine the top of Ecto one, like the top of that car and all the different accoutrement that were on top of it, and he had to source all of that, and he says, Yeah, they went to a junk yard that outside of a NASA site and they got all of that and I had to figure out what they were. And then how does that help you catch ghosts?
Is there really a junk yard outside of NASA? Said, Because that sounds amazing and I would kill.
I'll put you in touch with him, Yeah, because he can tell you where they went to get all the different pieces, because they had like various pieces of sonart they had They had an old h I think it was like an old ground to air missile launch case. There was nothing in it because apparently that would be bad to get out there. But yeah, so there's the Yeah, I'll get you in touch with him because he can
certainly tell you more about where they sourced all that stuff. Yeah, because that was it was somewhere out west, I know. But and keep in mind Ghostbusters were made back in the early eighties, so maybe they've tightened up since then, but it was pretty it was pretty incredible, And yeah, learning about that like that, that experience of having to to really find out the way sources sometimes is fascinating to me because you know, I hold on to stuff
fairly for a fairly long time. But I mean, it's just technology is just one of those things that goes
obsolete so quickly. And also there's just so many different parts that if any one part fails, the average person is more likely to either go out and buy a new one and just throw the old one away or just do without, because a repair tends to be about the same amount of money as it would cost to just buy a new one anyway for a lot of the older tech, So I imagine it gets really tricky, especially if they want something that's going to work on screen.
If it's something that's just going to be like, all right, well we just need this this washer dryer that was back then, but whenever you're going to use it, we just need in the background. I guess that's one thing, But if we need a working one, that's a totally different thing.
Yeah, it's this Season two has a lot of Well, we have the Arcade, which has John and I. Early on we were getting the scripts and stuff for season two talking about like how to get arcade cabinets that were in good enough shape or you know, when we get real ones, and then there's all this. I don't know if like the average viewer knows, but like playback is a thing that we deal with constantly on Stranger Things. It's the frame rate adjustment and stuff on various like screens and monitors.
Right, so your screen that you're you're shooting is refreshing at a certain rate, the camera is going at a certain rate, and if that doesn't match up properly, that's when you start getting those weird lines that start scrolling across the screen, which is realistic, but it's distracting because now you realize you're looking through the lens of a CA camera as opposed to being an observer on a scene. So you have to fix that all.
Right, and so and even season one was similar to like the there's various security rooms like at Hawkins Lab, and then we I think, I feel like I've bought every Commodore sixty four available because they tend to be fairly reliable and easy to work with and you can put various things into them, and so doing something similar, you know, a lot of I think a lot of productions probably would have put like LED screens or LCB.
You know, they would have just updated with new technology and not dealt with the playback aspect of running through like CRT monitors with whatever we need to show on screen. But we're we try to be as authentic as possible and stranger things, and so there's just a lot of our playback guy was always present. I felt like on
every set it was always like real monitors. Same with the arcade, and we did it all pretty practically, leaving a lot of those those alls monitors inside the cabinets and then just like running stuff through them and adjusting the frame rate.
So that's great.
I mean again, I just to me, that stuff definitely pays off. Like again, it gives that that feel that you want and that that sense that you're watching something that was made years ago and yet with a modern sensibility. So it's anyone who grew up around the same time I did, I think just has that deep connection when they see this there, you know, because it feels very Spielbergian in many ways. You know. It just it's very evocative of those those great films and TV series in
the eighties. So you guys did phenomenal work to recapture that and to make it feel like it was on screen. It looks effortless. I know that that's exactly the opposite of what it really was. It was very, very full of effort. But from an audience perspective, it just it just works so well. So I'm really looking forward to season two. We keep hearing rumors about how many seasons
they are going to be. I think there need to be as many seasons as there need to be to tell a story, and then we can we can close the chapter on that book and want more. I'm happy with that. We'll see because who knows what will happen down the line. But I am so really excited to see season two and beyond. And if you can put a word in for they need a bald guy as an extra, you know, even if he's just like screwing
a light bulbin in the background. I'm local, I'm right here, I know Randy, So Randy and I go way back. I can it's just throwing it out.
There maybe needs an assistant.
Yeah, who knows, I mean teaching assistant, or maybe just like a guy to like deal with all the insanely attractive women that he's dating. It's phenomenal. Really, it's like we I had a discussion with him about that, Like that was to me, like everything was believable up until they showed me, Like I was buying into it right up to that, and he's like, thanks, Jonathan, thanks a lot, You're welcome, Randy, You're good guy. Thank you Jess and
John for joining me on this show. I really appreciate the opportunity to explore what it is you do and get a deeper appreciation for the work that goes on behind the scenes. And this was phenomenal. I wish you guys the best of luck and success in the future, and maybe we'll have you on again at some point. We'll talk about some other crazy stuff like you know, let me tell you what now is the hardest prop I've ever had to find. You never know when that
story is going to change totally. Well, thank you guys again, thank you, thank you. I know it sounds like a broken record, but once again I have to thank Jess and John for coming into the office and talking with us, and of course thank you Ramsey for landing the interview. It was an amazing opportunity and I think it really turned out great. I very much enjoyed this. Like I said, I'm a huge fan of the show, and also just learning more about what goes on behind the scenes on
any kind of shoot is fascinating to me. I see all these terms all the time, and I don't really have a working knowledge of what they all mean. So we're hoping that in the future we'll get other professionals who have worked on various productions here in the Atlanta area to talk more about what it is they do so we can understand how the Best Boy turned out to be so darn best Because we don't know. We
want to know, but we don't know. You might already know, but keep it to yourself because I'm going to ask that best Boy when they get them in the the studio, So you guys, just hold on to that. But if you do have any suggestions for topics that you would like us to cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, or maybe there's a company that I should focus on or a particular person in tech, send me a message
let me know. The email address is tech Stuff at houstuffworks dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those would be tech Stuff HSW. Remember you can watch me record shows live on Wednesdays and Fridays that happens over at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff, and there you'll see not just the whole process of me recording, but what happens when I make mistakes, which is more frequent than I
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Who knows who.
Will show up in that chatroom, and I will talk to you guys again really soon
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