We’ve already seen the kids of Hawkins, Indiana, deal with first crushes, the horrors of the Upside Down, confronting past pain, and more, but as it turns out, our Stranger Things season 2 experience wasn’t complete without seeing the gang’s highs and lows in Lego form. Fortunately, we have been given the chance to remedy that. The YouTube account Bookshelf Productions has re-created some of the second season of the hit Netflix series’ best scenes, and the resulting video, Lego Stranger Things 2, is, well, totally tuuubular.
To be clear, the video is not a season 2 recap. Bookshelf Productions describes it as “your favorite scenes from Stranger Things Season 2 in Lego form.” As a result, there is a mix of scenes that are absolutely essential to the story and others that are more just hilarious to watch in both the original and Lego versions. For example, we get to re-experience Steve (Joe Keery) revealing his secret Farrah Fawcett hairspray tip to Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Hopper (David Harbour) dancing, and Billy (Dacre Mongtomery) hitting on Mrs. Wheeler (Cara Buono). As great as all those scenes are, they probably wouldn’t make the cut if the nearly five-minute video were a recap instead.
This isn’t Bookshelf Productions’ first time giving Stranger Things the Lego treatment. The channel posted a video in November 2016 that recreated some season 1’s most memorable scenes. While neither video shows Lego versions of any of the monsters from the Upside Down, we’re still impressed with what they’ve created.
The people behind the channel — “a brother and sister committed to telling amazing stories through the creative use of stop motion photography and Legos,” according to the account — have also used their skills for a Doctor Who 50th anniversary video. Beyond that, they haven’t posted very many Bookshelf Productions videos; the account only has 10 uploads at the time of this writing. Nonetheless, their efforts have not gone unappreciated by Stranger Things fans.
Netflix has ordered a third season of Stranger Things, and the series is expected to return in 2019. We’ll look forward to hopefully getting another Lego version of its best scenes sometime thereafter.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?