The Project

As Stranger Things reached its final season, Joshua set out to make a short film that captured the show’s look: a demogorgon stalking through his own living room, turned into the Upside Down. He gave himself two months and a single goal, to get as close to high-budget quality as a one-person production can.

The Workflow

Jetset ran on an iPhone mounted to his cinema camera, recording the camera movement as he shot. That tracking data went to Unreal Engine, which held the virtual elements, and the two were composited in DaVinci Resolve. Jetset also served as his virtual-production monitor, so he and his wife Eva could see the demogorgon placed in the room live while filming. As Joshua puts it, anyone choosing a camera tracker for virtual production should give Jetset a serious try.

To ground the CGI, he scanned his living room from more than 500 photos (using Reality Capture) and brought the mesh into Unreal, using door frames to scale the demogorgon correctly. The off-the-shelf creature model was not film quality, so he rebuilt it: sculpting in Blender (broad shape, then mid and high-frequency skin detail), texturing in Substance Painter for a slick, slimy look, and rigging and weight-painting so the petals opened cleanly. He added vines with Unreal’s procedural PCG system (aligned to the scan), spores with a Niagara particle simulation, and saliva with animated slime cards. Final shots were rendered in Octane for cinematic quality, with the Render Network Foundation providing render credit that cut a 100-hour shot down to about 12.

The Takeaway

Joshua’s short is a study in how far a single creator can push virtual production when the tools get out of the way. Jetset let him see and capture the creature in camera, on location, so the hardest part became the craft, the demogorgon itself, rather than the pipeline.