For our latest fxpodcast, we’re heading back into the Upside Down with a deep dive into the visual planning behind the final season of Stranger Things.
Joining us is Jordan Nounnan from Proof, who supervised the previs and postvis work across the show. Over nearly two years of production, Jordan and the team helped shape the season from its earliest conceptual stages right through to final visual effects integration.
Proof delivered close to 1,900 shots, covering everything from creature attacks and military battles to vehicle chases, dimensional environments, and large-scale destruction sequences. Their work wasn’t just about blocking action, it was about defining how the story would be seen, building camera language, staging, and rhythm well before cameras rolled, and then carrying that intent through editorial with postvis.
A key part of Proof’s pipeline was the use of Unreal Engine throughout, allowing fully rendered previs to drop directly into the cut, dramatically tightening iteration and giving filmmakers a much clearer sense of final lighting and environments early on. Alongside that, the team developed custom lighting workflows to seamlessly integrate CG creatures into practical plates, even matching complex flickering light sources in comp.
And in a particularly forward-looking move, they also explored Gaussian splatting techniques to merge multiple real-world locations into unified virtual spaces, giving directors the freedom to explore camera and staging across environments that didn’t physically exist as a single place.
Jordan Nounnan gives us a fascinating look at how previs has evolved from a planning tool into a central creative engine in modern production, and how teams like Proof are helping bridge the gap between concept, shoot, and final pixel.