Simulacra: The Production and Post Production Process

The film was shot in 6 days with a Sony VX 1000 Mini DV camera on 60 minutes mini DV tapes.We used Sennheiser MK 416 shotgun microphone and Rycote accessories for the sound recording.
The sound was recorded on DV tape.We had Glidecam 1000 Pro for the tracking shots but the camera was handheld in most of the shots.

Principal photography started on 22 October 2000 in "Nufus Sayimi". It was forbidden to get out on that day. Producer Yonca Erturk tried hard to get the permissions for the crew.

We worked with a very small crew. We were three or four in most of the scenes. For the subway (which also requires special permission), computer, deserted city and the office scenes we just used the available light.
For the house scene we used very little light. So 90 percent of the film was shot with the available light.

11 November 2000 was the last day of principal photography.

After the completion of screen shots and some minor details, 6 DV tapes (360 minutes of footage approx.) are
transferred to an AVID Media Composer 900 from a DV Deck with timecode at low resolution (AVR12) for the offline editing.

The offline editing process took 10 - 15 full days. We had five or six different versions until May 2001
But something was still missing and on 14 May 2001 we did some extra shooting (the city shots, skyscrapers etc.)

Emre Aypar was already working on music with an early offline copy.

The extra shots are integrated into the offline editing and on 26 May 2001 we had the final offline cut. It had 260+ cuts and the duration was 12 minutes. we get the EDL from Avid (CMX 3600 was the EDL format) and we compiled the film directly from the original masters on Inferno with Emre Aypar in Sinefekt.

The whole film is color corrected shot by shot on Inferno. Some stabilizing, tracking, color replacement are also done by Emre Aypar. With the creation of title sequence, the film's video is finished (13 minutes approx.) and transferred to Digital Betacam.

For the soundtrack we redigitized the Inferno output to Avid and we matched the sound of the offline editing to the Inferno output with Dylan Pank.

We did a lot of sound replacement, ADR, foley recordings, and get some cut fx from CD's. We used a Tascam DA PD 1 portable DAT recorder for the recordings. The sound editing and additional recording took 10 days approximately.

When the sound editing is over, Emre Aypar brought the music as aiff files, ready to import to Avid.Then we did final mixing in two days.

Finally we imported the soundtrack to Inferno and then we recorded on the Digital Betacam master tape. The film is completed in 9 months because we all had our dayjobs, nobody was paid for this project and finally we worked hard to make things right.