Fortitude is a psychological thriller television. It is settled in a fictional town called Fortitude, located in the Arctic Circle. Fortitude is consider one of the safest towns on earth. Until a violent crime takes place there, and the peace ends.
Narrative vision
This series is speaking to a public who is interested in science and thriller. One of it’s most characteristic features it’s the unusual location: is located in a fictional town in the Norwegian arctic. That means, in one hand, that the majority of the audience have never been in that area, because it is not a usual place to live. In the other hand, even the audience who is used to this kind of landscape have never been in this town, since it does not exist. This means that Fortitude can not connect to the interest of the people through their memories, but through their curiosity about the unknown, which goes along with the thriller genre. The audience will only identify the place by their idea of how a town in the arctic will look like. Therefore, the narrative vision will be really focused in the whole design of the Fortitude town, making it believable to the people and placing all the needed features to make all the action work within the same place. 
Terms of reference
When we hear about the basic plot, a clear example of a cult series which is most likely to pop into our minds is Twin Peaks. As Fortitude, Twin Peaks narrates the story of a crime in a calm fictional town, and everything that happens is really attached to the place in which this events take place. We can say in both series the real main character is the town itself, and both needed to focus specially in the creation and design of it as the most identifying factor of the series. It makes us think that Fortitude based part of their investigation in the analysis of Twin Peaks in order to design the series, and they might aim to attract the same or similar audience. Apart from the obvious analogies, we can discern certain direct references within the same series, as illustrated in the following example:
Ideation and design workflow
As mentioned before, the main point of ideation and design of Fortitude is the location. Therefore, they had to make up a whole atmosphere and infrastructure design. We imagine there has to be a lot of work developing the sketches and map paintings of the locations, to see where can they record it in the most effective way. As it is known, moving a whole series equipment and staff into the Arctic would have been extremely expensive, plus the hard weather conditions would have made the work much harder. Therefore, it is probably that the landscapes like the one illustrated in this image are 3D mappings and compositions (layered into a real footage or a complete 3D paintings). That is much easier and cheaper than moving the equipment to a place with climatic conditions of that type.
Technical research and development
To sum up, the biggest difficulty of Fortitude is the landscape and location. Actually, even if the series is based in the arctic, was actually recorded in Iceland and United Kingdom. Those locations have much less snow that the one that is supposed to be in te arctic, which means that the biggest post production work passed through adding snow. In the following picture we can see an example of a landscape in which the majority of the snow is most likely added in post production: While near the characters the amount of snow is scare, in the background the mountains are full of fake snow.
Also, we see an exaggerated foggy environment which is most likely made in post production, because if that fog was real they would have serious difficulties to have suck a clear image of that road from such a high point.
We have also few scenes in which we can see a snow storm. This snow is also probably fake, because it would be much harder to record on open air with that weather conditions since the technical equipment can be damaged.
Also, the snow is a good element to give movement and dynamism to the pictures, since it´s constantly moving. Akira Kurosawa always used the resource of the weather to make the still shots more dynamics.
Along with the references, a characteristic feature that people usually link to northern arctic are the Northern Lights. That is a good weapon to use to make people believe Fortitude is in the location that it is supposed to be. Therefore, we do not miss few scenes in which the Northern Lights are added in post production to make the environment more charming and believable for the audience. 
MA Visual Effects 