I noticed that season 1 in terms of pacing doesn’t seem to work as well as the next two when you cut it down. I have to figure the writing that season was more episodic feeling than the next two which do feel movie-like.
This is true. Season 1 definitely had a different structure compared to later seasons and that may have had an impact on the film’s pacing, although I had never really noticed it before.
I noticed in the season 2 edit the scene of Barbara’s funeral, the framerate seems to be stuttery.
I will check on that and see if I can fix it.
When you were working out how you’d cut these down, did you wind up moving much or anything around from what they were in vanilla? Or was it just straight forwardly trimming things?
Mainly I was trimming each episode down before putting them all together. And I think that -mainly- this approach has worked. There are however a couple occasions (especially in my s4 edits) where I rearranged and restructured several scenes in favor of pacing and storytelling.
There are other faneditors, Anjohan for example (who I admire greatly) with his GoT tv-to-film edits, who deviate significantly from each episode’s and each seasons’ pacing and narrative to create basically a whole new story. And I think that his approach works perfectly for his occasion. But regarding Stranger Things I don’t know how a similar approach could work, because of its movie-like writing as you have mentioned.