ORAVAYKA by Helın Mergen
Helin Mergen (aka ORAVAYKA / aka Helen)
Long story short : is a video producer, director & editor
based in Berlin, creating content, event-, music- & promo- videos.
She takes photos occasionally. And not only that, she also loves writing everyday, from articles to songs (click to listen);
from politics to mental health (click to read).
She paints, too (click to view).
Short story long : was born in Antalya, Turkey in 1995. She was always curious about the world and had many interests from volleyball to singing, from painting to filming... Wanting to be a biologist, for years, she studied maths and sciences in school before university, but finally she understood that only filmmaking can gather all her interests and skills in one bowl.
She has never felt like she belonged to where she was born and finally after high school, in 2014, all by herself, with the ein bisschen Deutsch she learned, she moved to Berlin. It was not only moving out of the family house, it was her first time abroad. Yet, within the first week, she made Berlin her new home.
She grabbed her camera, gifted by her parents, and started filming. She finished art-on-the-run Film School Berlin's programme and after learning a little bit of filmmaking, she worked for Berlin Music Video Awards as Content Manager, Video Editor and later on, as the Video Team Leader.
As her close filmmaker network founded a collective called Entropy, she became a member and produced videos with her team, for which they won awards in two countries.
Her first solo project got selected to multiple film festivals and got nominated for Best Music Video award at the Berlin Female Filmmakers Festival.
The multi-cultural Berlin brought the whole world to her feet and filmmaking opened her to the whole world; the 10 years-old Helin, dreaming about her future watching Dream TV (Turkish equivalent of MTV) , would have been so proud of the now Helin, making their dreams come true, one step at a time.
For she grew up with a computer like an internet Mogli, she always feels in her natural habitat whilst she is editing videos.
She has done projects from event videos to music videos, which gave her the right mind set and skills to produce quality content for variety of industries, while being aware of what could get their target customer/client/audience's attention. She is always focused on the solution.
Open for new projects and open to travel for projects.
Other than the videos, nowadays, she likes to go bouldering, make paintings and make her own music (she has one Turkish alt-pop single on Spotify, called Hâlâ Buradayım).
What is Oravayka?
Oravayka is what her Macedonian/Albanian descendant grandparents would call her jokingly, as she visited them:
"Oravayka oravayka, where have you been? Where did you travel?". Poorly translated: the girl who travels a lot.
As she began to write a travel blog back in 2014, she decided to name the blog Oravayka -which she deleted later on, just like videos on her Youtube channel. As she made this current website, she decided that it should stay her title. Because it is a part of her and it reminds her of her grandmother, who raised her up and put her front of Dream TV. May she rest in peace.
In 2023, Helın Mergen can be found working part-time somewhere to pay the bills, or at home singing to the walls, painting on Amazon delivery card boxes, or shouting in German somewhere in Friedrichshain, to prove she is integrated and that she deserves her German pass already.
She is currently making social media content, while trying to find ways to over come her perfectionism, in order to make more projects. Next on: her own music videos for her own songs and finding a remote job, in a team where her skills are appreciated.