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Stranger Things Season 5 Discussion

I did find this in an article on the behind the scenes documentary:

The Pain Tree ultimately became a massive practical build at 130 feet long and 80 feet wide and took 16 weeks to construct while the surrounding story was still up in the air.

If this is only for the interior set, this would essentially just be the size inside the Mind Flayer's ribcage, with the entire creature presumably being quite a bit bigger, especially once the legs are accounted for.

This article is also useful in giving information on the Abyss Mind Flayer's body structure:

Martin Hill: The scale of the Mind Flayer starts with the design, when in the Pain Tree form, where Vecna is holding the captured kids, needed to disguise the Mind Flayer in plain sight, with the big reveal only happening when our heroes, seemingly at the end of the journey, approach it. It needed to be immense, with the tips of the legs scraping the sky. The detailing of the model by Layne Howe and James Moore was essential for the scale, sculpting fine layered organic forms that feel like they’ve grown rather and distorted than been carved, making clear distinctions between the different materials of cartilage, bone, vines and shell.

We covered it the Stranger Things language of vines, and thorns which broke up the silhouette, and deposited sand and dust over it to embed it into the environment and give the sense of age and rootedness that belied the moving creature. This gave us interactivity of the dust falling and the vines snapping as the Mind Flayer starts to animate. We referenced the bone snapping from earlier in the series, as the limbs hyper-extend breaking the joints, creating blood waterfalls and pieces of shell breaking off as they double back on themselves.

Once the legs have folded down, you’ll notice about the Mind Flayer is at has 22 legs (at one point it had 26!) all of which need to move in sync without crashing or interpenetrating, the rig for all the ball joints soft tissue with the carapace is quite astonishing!

In terms of motion tests, it was clear it needed to move like a spider (or 2¾ spiders). To achieve this, the animators needed to pay attention to the order of the legs motion, with different gaits having differing orders of leg motion. To show weight and size, each leg impact was embedded into the ground, displacing vast amounts of rock and sand. The Mind Flayer needed to be more solid than the smoke or flesh Mind Flayers of earlier seasons. The creature’s exoskeleton is spider/crab-inspired but not fully rigid, so we can see the secondary motion and slow, heavy jiggle that help illustrate scale, whilst residual vines swing from the body.

Hundreds of articulated teeth and thorns were added and animated to add to the threat when close up to the creature. Animators not only controlled the three-way jaw articulation but also controlled the breath of the Mind Flayer, which in turns drove the simulation of dust and drool of the creature.

Also worth noting is that according to the above article, it seems that a scene of Eleven removing one of the Mind Flayer's legs was removed to avoid making her seem too powerful compared to it:

El and the Mind Flayer charge, and we worked in the training moves El does earlier in the series to put them into action, then for the final leap she is boosted by the ground being forced up from a leg impact and helping launch El into the air. In an earlier version of the previs during the leap she uses her powers to rip off one of the smaller Mind Flayer’s legs mid-flight, but this unbalanced the power dynamic between the two making El too powerful.
 
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