Dean Zimmerman (‘Stranger Things’ editor) video interview

Jul 25, 2023

Dean Zimmerman won an Emmy for his editing work on "Stranger Things" for the show's first season in 2017 and was nominated for Seasons 2 and 3 in 2020 and 2022, respectively, as well. But it's safe to say he was never more challenged in his career than he was for the Netflix sci-fi/horror hit in its fourth season, when his job became suddenly supersized. "Season 3 clocked in at eight episodes and just under eight hours of material, and Season 4 has nine episodes and clocked in at just under 13 hours," Zimmerman notes. "So yeah, it was quite the hill to climb, to say the least." And indeed, the final stage of that hill proved the most challenging climb of all: the show's epic Season 4 finale "The Piggyback" that filled a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes, or three times the normal episode length, jam-packed with some 300 scenes and a massive collection of interlocking storylines.

"Fortunately, I had a lot of help," Zimmerman says with a sigh. Zimmerman spoke to Gold Derby as part of our "Meet the Experts" editors roundtable. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Editing that "Stranger Things" ninth episode finale (also naturally Zimmerman's Emmy submission) was essentially like working a feature. "‘The Piggyback’ took a long time to shoot as well," he points out, "just because of the complexity of everything. I definitely enlisted the help of Kat Naranjo, who has been with us since Season 1 and with whom we have a really great shorthand. I also had Casey Cichocki, who I was nominated with last year. It was just a very big, daunting task. It was all hands on deck to be perfectly honest. It wasn't just the amount of material we were getting. The finale also required the most attention because it had 1,200 visual effects shots in it, which was almost a third of what we had for the (entire) season. So it was massive, and all of that had to be done, and approved, and turned over so we could not only make it but that it could look as good as it did…in such a short amount of time."

Yes, Zimmerman was editing around 1,200 CG effects in addition to everything else. "It was like, let's throw everything into this one episode, right? So you had CG creatures, we had these massive location changes, all the different storylines that were going along – and while wrapping up all these characters, let's just throw a music video in there. So it definitely encapsulated the spectrum of complexity for editing, for sure."

Oh yes, the music video. It's a rendition of Metallica's 1986 tune "Master of Puppets," and incorporating the sequence was almost as difficult as editing a separate episode. Coordinating the story and the video's visuals "was one of the hardest things to do," Zimmerman asserts. "When it's scripted, it's easy to say, ‘Oh, I want the music to start here and I want the lyrics to start here. But when you’re dealing with CG creatures and time, the hardest part was making those beats happen within the constraints of a song that you’re trying to cut along with the choreography of all the stuff that needs to happen within it. So that was very complex. We had to do a lot of magic in music editing."

To say the least, editing "Stranger Things" last season was a radically different experience than it was at the beginning, Zimmerman agrees. "We’ve definitely upped the ante for sure," he says, "and that's really the trajectory that we’ve been following since Season 1. We kind of started out as this ‘Goonies’ Meets ‘Stand By Me’ kind of thing, and now we’ve kind of turned into ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ on steroids with CG creatures. So it's definitely grown, and the intention was to have the show grow with the kids. And with that you’re able to push the envelope with the horror and the gore and that kind of stuff…and people seem to respond and like it. And so we’ll see what happens next season – the last season, I should say."

All four seasons of "Stranger Things" stream on Netflix.

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