Furious is the first feature-length film about the Ryazan native Evpaty Kolovrat, commander of the army which fought against the Mongols in 1238.
Mid-13th-century Russia is fragmented into principalities that fall one by one before the
westward Mongol expansion led by Batu Khan. Terrified by the ruthless hordes, most of the Russian princes surrender their lands on enemy terms. The invaders pillage and burn down cities, flooding Russian soil with blood, until a Ryazan swordsman Evpaty Kolovrat stands in their way. Kolovrat leads a detachment of several hundred brave souls to avenge his love, his people, and his homeland. Kolovrat’s courage is so astounding, even Batu Khan himself is humbled by it. The legendary warrior’s name forever remains in his people’s memory, and his heroic feat lives on in the annals of history.
The film was shot in 72 filming days from the end of January to the beginning of May, 2016. Furious is the first Russian film to be shot entirely in chroma key. Filming took place in Moscow, in facilities specially constructed on the territory of the ZIL factory. The facilities built at ZIL included the largest green screen studios in Europe, with a total area of over 4,000 square meters (43,000 square feet), record breaking in the history of Russian film production. Other facilities included a training gym, stables, and an arena for horse riding.Visual effects were created by Main Road Post (Wanted, Stalingrad, Attraction).
A team of 450 professionals from 16 studios based in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, and India, worked over a period of 18 months to complete the film ( 1903 CG shots).
“The shooting process was very complicated. On the one hand, you’d think it would be easy indoors – no cold, snow or rain to worry about, no impenetrable mud. And where lighting is concerned it’s very easy. But for the DoP Maxim Osadchiy the green screen posed a majorchallenge. He couldn’t see what the final picture would look like; basically he was setting upthe light, hitting record and hoping for the best. Sometimes it was very difficult for us to combine the graphics we had created with the filmed material in a way which was truly convincing. Coming up with the true-to-life images was a rather difficult artistic task.
The visual success of the film is thanks to the staggering amount of work we all put in, and our close collaboration with the DoP, costume designers and makeup artists. Dzhanik Fayziev showed us references, old pictures of snowy cityscapes and the like. We know from the sources and from historical reconstructions that cities of the time would probably seem small villages to the modern eye. We had to work with the dimensions of the buildings so that a modern viewer would think of the settlement as a city. The houses are not simple huts; we gave them that folksy Russian look complete with decorations and carvings. We used a lot of red folk designs and folk carvings such as roosters and accolades. As for the snow, we made it as thick and fluffy as possible, and used bright cold colors. We made a conscious decision to employ this kind of not entirely realistic but convincing style, “reality plus” as we called it among ourselves.
In the end we had different looks and feels for Ryazan: peaceful, beautiful and sunny at the beginning; then burning, fiery and charred; and finally mournful and bleak, after the city’s destruction. We had to create a tool that would enable us to quickly switch between the intact, burning and destroyed forms of various individual houses, because we had many frames to work on.“, says Arman Yahin, CEO of VFX studio Main Road Post.
More concept arts from Legend of Kolovrat: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZQm8R