Slumdog Millionaire wins "Best Film"...without much film at all.

Slumdog Millionaire is truly one of those inspirational filmmaker stories. We never get tired of an underdog and a low budget film about a poor person in India is about as un-commercial as you can get in the feature film industry.

The recognition for the film (to date) includes:

2008 Camerimage Film Festival "Golden Frog" Award for best-in-class visual aesthetic and technical values

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures "Best Film for 2008"

American Society of Cinematographers nominates Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC for Outstanding Achievement Award for Slumdog Millionaire.

A total of four 2009 Golden Globe Awards






Nominated for ten Academy Awards

Received 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography and"Film" Editing.


In addition to being amazing, it's also a "film" that was acquired, in the majority, digitally. (depending on who you're quoting and whether or not you refer to raw footage or finished screen time the figure sits around 60-70%).

There has been a LOT of buzz around some Digital Cinema Cameras, but this one has been a bit under the radar.

The Silicon Imaging 2K and 2K Mini are now officially cameras of legitimate capability... Actually they really aren't two cameras. The 2K Mini is the sensor assembly alone and works by ethernet link to a fast laptop, which constitutes the 'processing' portion of the camera body, complete with viweing LUTs and an onboard version of Iridas SpeedGrade embedded for viewing picture adjustment. The full SI 2K takes the mini and inserts it into a full camera body with all the processing and storage on board, including the embedded version of SpeedGrade, no laptop required. If you have the full SI-2K, you already have the Mini, just detach it from the full body and connect it to the body via ethernet and you have a dash cam or POV camera with a full body on .

The camera uses a Super 16mm sized Bayer sensor (for more on Bayer, see my blog post on the Bayer patent from 12-14-08).

The workflow-favored format for the camera to write to is CineForm RAW, which is a high quality, compressed RAW motion picture format that has several post workflow options for editing directly inside an NLE without 'flattening' the image.

(**I should probably point out that I was involved a bit with this camera's testing prior, and shortly after its release, as well as involved with CineForm products, so I am probably not without my biases...)

Congratulations to everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire, and congratulations to Silicon Imaging and CineForm.

Links for more info:

Slumdog Millionaire at IMDb

Silicon Imaging

CineForm