Unhindered Studios' Stranger Things videos get 100+ million views

Unhindered Studios published eight videos in the weeks following the fifth season of Stranger Things, starting on 18 December and finishing on 28 January. They were watched just over 74 million times on Instagram and close to 30 million times on TikTok. One video accounted for 38.4 million of the Instagram total on its own.

Five of the eight were drip edits, putting the show's characters in high-fashion styling over "LV Sandals" by Esdee Kid. The track had been out since February 2025, ten months before the first video went up. Within days of the first Stranger Things edit upload, people were arriving at the song on YouTube and commenting that the edits had sent them there. They were still arriving weeks after the last video had gone out.

The format itself spread faster than any individual video. Hundreds of accounts reposted the originals, and a large number went further and built their own versions, applying the same treatment to other shows and characters. Videos in the format were still being posted several weeks after the season had finished airing.

Behind each video was up to two days of work. The process started with research, working out which characters carried the most pull and which audio was moving fast enough to be worth building on. "A drip edit has about a second to be recognised," said Kamran Sankey, co-founder and managing director of the studio. "If someone has to work out who they are looking at, they have already scrolled past." Design came next, with the outfits and the settings built out before anything was generated. Prompting was the longest stage by a distance, done in Kling and taking multiple iterations on a single shot before an outfit would hold its shape through a camera move. Generation produced far more material than was used, and the edit cut it down to something with a shape. Polishing took the rest, and it is where most of the two days ended up. Most of that time went on small details.

The clothing had to survive a paused frame, which is where viewers go looking when they suspect something is generated. The backgrounds had to sit inside the show's world without lifting a shot from it. The camera work leaned on dolly moves, pushing into a space or pulling back out of it, with the characters resetting their positions on every change, which is one of the harder things to hold consistent across a generated sequence and one of the reasons the videos read as deliberate rather than automatic.

The remaining three were mini episodes: short alternate endings to the season. These worked on the opposite principle to the drip edits. Where an edit needs to be understood instantly, the mini episodes attached themselves to the parts of the ending people were still arguing about weeks later, and gave those arguments somewhere to go. One was built as a standalone narrative piece and pushed at how far Kling could carry dialogue, with the main characters talking through what might have happened to Eleven and where each of them thinks she is now. The other two told their endings visually. Both centred on Mike and Eleven, and one carried an original song written and produced by Unhindered Studios, "Right Side Up", the title pointing at the two of them finally being out of The Upside Down and getting on with their lives. Everything was produced in-house on the studio's generative pipeline.

The fastest piece went from concept to publish in 24 hours, and that speed is why it worked. Attention on the season was already there, and the videos got in front of it before it faded. What kept it going afterwards was other people. Accounts were still posting their own versions after the last video had gone out, long after the season itself had stopped being talked about.