Stranger Things season 5 filming: when, where and how the last season was shot

A year of filming

The first day of filming was announced with a photo of the crew together, on January 8, 2024. The last, in December 2024, with a message from the Duffers and farewell images from the actors. Between the two, eleven months, the longest filming period of the show, for eight episodes including one of more than two hours.

Writing had started in the summer of 2022, right after Season 4, then stopped during the writers' strike, from May to September 2023, followed by the actors' strike. Without those strikes, filming would have started in the spring of 2023.

Where the season was filmed

As since 2016, the town of the show is played by a small commune south of Atlanta, Jackson, whose main street serves as downtown, and by suburban residential neighborhoods for the Wheeler and Byers houses. The interiors, the lab, and the Upside Down were built in Atlanta studios, some of whose stages occupied entire hangars.

For the quarantine, production built ruined streets, military checkpoints and a rift crossing the roadway, as a real set, rather than all in CGI.

The method

The Duffers directed the key episodes, including the first and the last; Shawn Levy directed two, and Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, came out of eleven years of retirement to direct two others, chapters 3 and 5. The eight scripts were written before the first clap, which made it possible to shoot the episodes partly in parallel, by locations rather than in order. That is also why the season could be split into three volumes: each block already had its shape in the edit.

Actors who have grown up

The six children of 1983 were between twenty and twenty-three on set. It is the shoot that fixed the date of the story: eighteen months after the 1986 rift, in the fall of 1987, so the age gap stayed credible. Nell Fisher, the new Holly, was twelve and played an eight-year-old.

Markers

The shoot in numbers

The final table read of the script happened in the middle of the shoot, not before: the Duffer Brothers do not share their texts in advance, and the cast had not read the last chapter until then. Some actors, like Nell Fisher, had already shot scenes of the finale before reading it in full.

What the season tried that was new

The Duffers said they used the last season to test shooting methods new to them. The most visible is “demo-vision,” first-person shots seen through the eyes of a Demogorgon, which serve from the first episode when Will witnesses the convoy attack from inside the creature.

The digital de-aging was pushed further than in Season 4. For the 1983 prologue, an eleven-year-old child played Will on set, and Noah Schnapp's face was applied in post by Wētā FX, the method already used for Eleven with a body double. The melting room of episode 6, where Nancy and Jonathan split, took Shawn Levy six to eight months of preparation, between engineering and special effects.

Finally, the schedule was built so that each actor's last day corresponded to their last scene in the story, which the creators present as a deliberate choice despite the complexity of a shoot of that size.

The calendar constraints

Filming should have started much earlier. The writers' strike, from May 6 to September 27, 2023, then the actors' strike, pushed production back several months. Two actors also had overlapping commitments: David Harbour had to shoot Thunderbolts in Atlanta at the same time as the show, and Winona Ryder had, since she arrived in 2015, a clause letting her step away for a Beetlejuice sequel. The strikes pushed those projects too, and both were able to be shot before the season started.

The directors changed too. Dan Trachtenberg, hired in June 2023, had to withdraw for Predator: Badlands; Frank Darabont took over his episode and signed a second. In March 2024, Millie Bobby Brown was still announcing nine months of shooting; in July, Ross Duffer said he was halfway; in October, Finn Wolfhard announced the coming end.

After filming: a year of post-production

The last shot filmed on December 20, 2024 was only the start of a year of work. In January 2025, the Duffers announced that the visual effects were ahead of schedule; in August, the first two chapters were “locked, mixed, scored, color-timed,” according to Ross Duffer; at the end of August, chapters 3 and 4; in October, the edit of the whole season was finished, and the last three episodes of the second volume were declared done on December 11, 2025.

That timeline explains the eleven months between the end of filming and the first volume. With chapters the size of a movie and sequences like the spider of the Abyss, the melting room, or the digital de-aging of Will, post-production was a second production.

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