The award-winning documentary series 'Welcome to Wrexham', shot with Blackmagic's URSA Mini Pro 12K

'Welcome to Wrexham', a documentary that tells the story of the football club that was acquired and directed by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, has been filmed in Blackmagic RAW with the URSA Mini Pro 12K camera.

The series Welcome to Wrexham, which captures the club's odyssey to climb the ranks of the ever-contested English soccer, has received five Creative Arts Emmy Awards in the categories of best reality program. unscripted, best cinematography, best editing, best direction and best sound mixing. This award-winning second installment of the series greatly evolves the audiovisual narrative of the format. Craig Robert Hastings, director of photography, reveals that the goal of the series' creative team was to give the series a more cinematic look, accentuating the drama of the journey of a small football club in its efforts to reach the EFL: "Although we had several cameras to film the matches, most of the recordings required shooting with a single hand-held camera. We needed a compact and lightweight equipment with good sensitivity to low light conditions and variable speed options."

After studying the market, Hasting decided to shoot in resolution 4K, an aspect ratio 17:9 and format Blackmagic RAW with the camera URSA Mini Pro 12K. The main camera was used with a lens Angenieux 30-90mm PL, among other lenses: “Combine cameras with fixed focal length lenses Zeiss Super Speed It was essential, in particular, when filming in low light conditions or with stage lights. This decision gave us the opportunity to transcend the typical realistic style and make the scenes feel more intimate.” The production team of Welcome to Wrexham He also opted for Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K to capture the action from the locker rooms and convey the most personal stories of its protagonists.

The post-production of Welcome to Wrexham

Marcin Orlowski was responsible for managing all backups and creating backups on two 80TB storage devices in the UK. Post-production teams Welcome to Wrexham in the United Kingdom and the United States were able to access the 3TB of daily data (15 TB in the case of filming on a match day) and download it using cable Internet connections. Subsequently, proxy files were created using the application Blackmagic Proxy Generator.

The Cricket Company Lane Post Production, based in Santa Monica, was in charge of all aspects of the completion of the images, including the grading and final editing, processes that were completed using the software DaVinci Resolve Studio. Bryan Rowland, director, editor and executive producer of the series, details what the editing of one of the key episodes of the series was like: "In the seventh episode of the first season, I had the freedom to work entirely in DaVinci Resolve, since the program moves away from the standard format. I emphasized the direction and filming of the episode, and then, in post-production, I used DaVinci Resolve for the editing of the images and Fusion to carry out the compositions. This allowed me to speed up my work and boosted my creativity.”

https://youtu.be/RUonBBRtMZo