FTII People

What happens when you have a camera where you can detach the image registering area (film plane, sensor chip) from the image recording area (magazine, flash drive) through an ethernet cable (that can run upto 20 feet)..hold the image registering meachanism in your hand and carry the image recording mechanism on a back pack, roam all around bombay shooting....phew....Ok, visually one might look like a fancy corporation worker sparying DDT (although banned) or a misplaced farmer in middle of mumbai traffic (again sparying the banned DDT). Little would be the chance, wherein, I would have guessed that they are in the process of shooting a kick ass movie.

I first heard about this movie from DI colourist Mac and then Ken at Adlabs, then through magazines, now after having won the cameraimage award (not me, the movie), I think it is causing quite a ripples in the film world...Danny Boyle, the Director and his team chose to shoot some parts of the movie in SI-2K camera (mini), the architecture of which I had tried to explain above. Mind you, the backpack has nothing but a Mac book pro on which the images are recorded.

There are tonnes of reason I am waiting for this movie to be released in India. Right from the fact that

Its capture and projection is 2K.

Shot in India.

Shot with a camera which makes my relatively fresh Film Institue days suck into a vortex which is far behing in time, in terms of technology

'cos, it makes me remember, with an unbelievably urgent nostalgia, of the days when we needed two students (we still need them) to carry the Mitchell fixed on a palanquin, like they carry gods during procession in South Indian temples.

'cos of compression...compression..compression....(3.5:1, 5:1, 10:1)

'cos of visually 'OK' image artifacts (Soman Sir, are you there...)

'cos of script...script...script...(yesss, HE is there..)

and ofcourse, the hangover from Trainspotting...

hi aravindan
i too eagerly await the release of slumdog millionaire here. of course for the movi as well as for the cinematography whichis much talked about and looks darn good too

Hi Param,
Just read the ASC article on Slum Dog yesterday. Its a comprehensive article. They had given the workflow and also the cost of production. Ofcourse, most of them in this site would have read it. Contrary to what I thought and wrote, the production have also used 35 mm film (around 30% of the movie), release print is on Kodak 2383 (unless mastered for digital projection). I stand corrected. There is also a mention by the Cinematographer (I love this word, than DOP) that SI-2K coped up with the unforgiving contrast ratios of in India conditions and fared well than RED in highlight clipping...thats very interesting...