The Rising Hawk

The Rising Hawk recounts Ivan Franko's story of a mountain community in the Carpathians that fought off a 13th century Mongol invasion, and the production required a specific landscape the actual Carpathians lack: a valley walled on two sides by towering cliffs, exactly as Franko described. Production designer Vlad Odudenko reported that the crew searched the mountains for a matching gorge and never found one, so the team built part of the valley as a physical set on FILM.UA's outdoor lot near Kyiv and extended the remainder with computer graphics. Visual effects supervisor Vasyl Honcharov said the hardest task on the project was making that gorge look real. The crew also did location filming in the Carpathians near Lake Synevyr in Zakarpattia through the summer of 2018, and that footage had to sit convincingly beside the built and painted gorge. When the story called for a Mongol army bigger than the available riders, the crew digitally duplicated background performers. Chumak is credited on the film as digital matte painter, PostModern Digital.