The Stronghold

In The Stronghold, a teenager from the present day travels through a time portal into Kyivan Rus and fights beside legendary bogatyrs against Cuman raiders. To create that world, the production combined real Ukrainian landscapes with a large practical set. The portal and forest scenes were filmed at the Dovbush Rocks in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast and the Korostyshiv quarry in Zhytomyr Oblast, and a fortress and a village-on-water set were built from the ground up at Troieshchyna in Kyiv because no existing location matched the story. The final battle posed its own environment challenge. It was shot in three places that were far apart and looked nothing alike, so the VFX team had to rework shots to read as one continuous place. Some of the angles that appear in the finished cut were never filmed at all; those shots had to be rebuilt in 3D closely enough to cut seamlessly against footage shot for real. The Ukrainian studio Postmodern handled the visual effects, and that work received a FICCI BAF Awards nomination in India. Chumak was a digital matte painter on the film.