Turkish Telenovela You Name It Shot Exclusively with the URSA Mini Pro 4.6K

Blackmagic Design has today announced that its URSA Mini Pro 4.6K digital film cameras were chosen as the principal camera package on popular Turkish daily soap opera, ‘Adini Sen Koy’ (You Name It). Now in its second season, the Star TV telenovela attracts an audience of millions every day in Turkey.
Directed by Tuna Kiremitçi, the show is lensed by director of photography (DP) Emre Yilmaz, who selected the URSA Mini Pro as his preferred camera because its high-quality image production and light sensitivity afforded him total flexibility to maximize a packed shooting schedule. Shooting around 15 to 20 pages of script every day, six days a week doesn’t leave a lot of margin for error.
“The ISO and shutter values of the URSA Mini Pro are excellent for allowing us to push the gain without the risk of noise or grain; even at dusk, we can still work with available light by opening up our lens aperture to 1.3 and rating the camera at 1600 ASA. That reduces the likelihood of us needing to reshoot due to fading light,” he explains.
Each of the four PL mount URSA Mini Pros are paired with a mix of medium-to wide-angle Elite lenses and mounted on rails and dollies together with Blackmagic Video Assist for monitoring purposes. “The ability to apply LUTs to the main SDI output was very helpful when reviewing shots, while the AC uses the cameras’ film profile with false color to ensure shots are correctly exposed,” adds Emre.
The production team relies on a ProRes workflow for acquisition and post. “As with many daily serials in Turkey we have to turn everything around quickly and so captured everything in ProRes 4444. That balances our need for speed in post-production while still ensuring we have access to plenty of dynamic range during the DI.”
‘Adini Sen Koy’ is also graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio, with Emre praising its color rendition and speed of use. “The combination of Resolve with the URSA Mini Pro is an obvious choice for us, as it’s so easy to convert our rushes to a Rec709 color space. The current trend is to have high contrast and saturation, but I prefer a paler aesthetic, as I believe it adds to the drama of our story, so DaVinci’s subtlety and precision are extremely important.”
“While international distribution revenues are growing year on year, production budgets continue to be squeezed, and we as creatives are being pushed to ensure the production values appeal to a much broader audience,” Emre concludes. “Camera choice is critical. Not only does it need to be reliable and flexible, but it also has to deliver the very best images possible. The URSA Mini Pro not only fits these requirements, but its color science and picture quality are outstanding for the price point.”