Stories in the making.
Assistant director, director, designer, founder. Istanbul, behind the monitor.
Scroll, the day beginsCALL TIME 06:00Read it like a shooting day.
An assistant director keeps the clock on set: who is where, which scene, how many minutes left. I did that for eight years, then carried the same discipline into building companies. Below is the schedule for the day. Call time to wrap, scene by scene.
2008 to now, nine scenes.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver in middle school. Websites, logos, posters for neighbours, shopkeepers, anyone who asked. High school added editing and motion graphics. The taste for storytelling started here: a site that looked good was not enough, it had to say something.
I started at Lig TV as a match statistics operator and finished as crew leader. Live broadcast forgives nothing: miss the second and it is gone. The same year I entered Istanbul Bilgi University, Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Circuits by day, football by night.
We founded the Leadership Club: 150+ events, ten of them mine to run. For March 8th, It Takes Eight: eight women's stories, eight installations by artist Gülsün Erbil, an exhibition, a dance show, a screening. The national press covered it. First short film, Before I Go (2016). Graduation project, Bastion the Sentinel: a semi-autonomous robot that collects litter and sorts it into paper, glass and plastic. Meanwhile my freelance team of five shipped brand identities, websites, apps and videos.
I took over Kiwi Digital and ran it as agency president for eight months. With my old freelance team: social media management, promo films, motion graphics for twelve-plus clients. The lesson: clients do not want ideas, they want a system that runs. Nine years later I would hang that sentence on a company wall.
I joined Hakan Yonat's crew at Kala Film. Second AD: call times, the shooting schedule, cast traffic, "quiet on set, rolling". Vakıfbank 65th Year, Total, Torku, Adidas Marathon, Halkbank, Lay's, the Presidency's Doctors' Day film. The set teaches one thing: you make the plan, the day goes elsewhere, you still finish.
Freelance AD. Public Film, Norr, Terra, Panda, Mental!. Lego, Beko, Hellmann's, İş Bankası, Yapı Kredi, Axess, Letgo, İKSV 50th; first AD and guest cast on a Magnum music video. In 2021, third AD on Another Self, Netflix's most-watched Turkish series worldwide. The same year I directed IronSource's Story across the globe, and co-created Helix, a crime series taken into pre-production with Deimos Pictures for Netflix, then BluTV, suspended after five months. 2023: floor AD on season two of Şahsiyet (Persona), the Emmy-winning series. Onur Saylak directing, Haluk Bilginer in the lead.
Side scene: in 2022 a line of t-shirts and posters I designed with Midjourney sold on Redbubble. Discontinued; a good experiment.
Assistant director on Naser, a series about the Bosnian War, and second unit director on several shooting days. On the dark comedy Not Your Average Family I joined the writing room as well as the set. I directed Bahçeşehir's 30th anniversary film under Danyal Temiztürk, the VFX artist, as general director. In the gaps we launched Unique Ambiences, a 4K landscape and soundscape channel.
A production company with Buğra Özbay and Arif Can Çine. The three of us had spent years on commercial, series and film sets. We were bored of the same recipes, the same "safe" choices. unorthodogs exists to shoot work that is raw, sharp and alive. An office in Levent, a dog at the door.
udogs.co ↗nous works, with B. Ege Yılmaz: software, consulting and creative under one roof, AI inside the work. I am the creative director. What I brought from the set is simple: no slide decks, we leave behind a system that runs. On the shelf today: tabak, mesken, rabbit, randevu, fısıltı, devral, boarder, FineDisplay, Kick, Syphon Viewer; sancak on the App Store. unorthodogs is the production arm of this roof.
Half reason, half instinct.nousworks.co ↗
A cut of the productions where I was on set as assistant director. Tap a card, the film plays here.
I did not direct these films. I kept the clock. The director is named on every card.
Rolling list. Hover to pause.
Ömer Faruk Bakırcı · Istanbul, 1995 –
That's a wrap.
For today. The last scene is unwritten.
WRAP 22:00