Four More for Fortitude

We are excited to announce that ICE Film have sent off the kit for the third and final season of Sky Atlantic’s arctic thriller Fortitude. Filmed at Bottle Yard Studios and on location in Svalbard, the chaos surrounding Sherriff Anderson (Richard Dormer) is set to escalate even further as two new police officers arrive from Oslo.

A Comment on Climate Change

Seen by some as a pioneer of the ‘cli-fi’ subgenre, Fortitude does more than just touch on the issues of climate change. The melting corpse of a prehistoric mammoth sits in a melting glacier and releases parasitic wasps that spread a virus through the local population.

The striking opening scene of season 1 shows a polar bear mauling a human but Michael Gambon strolls in and shoots the human through the head rather than the bear. The symbolic references towards the threat of climate change continue throughout the series and are worth looking out for.

From Iceland to Bristol to Svalbard

A high volume of quality equipment is needed to produce a big budget show like Fortitude, both when filming on location in freezing conditions and when filming more complex scenes in the studio. The production is using 50,000 sq ft of build space including two tank houses and one studio at Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol.

In the context of location shooting, the drama has moved set from Iceland to Svalbard creating a fair amount of extra work for producers who will have to cut and paste the scenery to retain a degree of continuity.

The show is in fact set in the fictional town of Fortitude in Svalbard but has been filmed in Iceland up until now. The team have thus been given the strange job of making their now geographically correct location look more like the plains and cliffs of Eastern Iceland.

Jason Roberts will be coordinating the project and has stated that, “if people are looking closely for differences they’ll be able to spot them”. Nevertheless, the benefits of computer-generated effects will no doubt have been appreciated by those given the job of merging the Icelandic and Norwegian scenery.

Just Four More Hours

Seeing as 1.4 million viewers tuned in for each episode of season two, it is likely that many will be disappointed that the final series will only consist of four hour-long episodes. Hopefully Season 3 will provoke as much intrigue and distress as its two predecessors!