eDit 9. honored Ray Harryhausen for his innovative body of work. Phil Tippett saluted the visual effects pioneer’s influence with a montage of Harryhausen’s films. All festival images © eDIT Filmmaker´s Festival.

Last month, the wildly successful eDIT 9. Filmmakers Festival: Art and Science of the Moving Image — a project of the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education and the Arts and the Hessian Institute of Private-Sector Broadcasting (LPR) under the patronage of Udo Corts, Hessian minister of science and the arts — was staged in Frankfurt. The city has a population of 670,000 and is Germany’s finance and transportation center. It also holds a passion for the filmmaking industry.

“The state of Hessen supports eDIT Filmmaker’s Festival in the strong conviction that the combination of innovation technology and its creative use — as presented in this festival — makes for one of the most promising future industries of our society,” explained Udo Corts.

The festival program is presented in cooperation with the Visual Effects Society (VES), and VES founder Tom Atkin — who has worked closely with eDIT since it formed a relationship with VES in 2001, and is a co-director of the event, working in close collaboration with Frankfurt-based festival directors Sebastian Popp and Rolf Kramer.

eDIT 9. counted several thousand attendees, visiting from Germany, as well as Austria, Finland, Switzerland, Croatia, the U.S. and U.K. Event organizers hope to see in grow, but not lose its intimacy. “It’s like family; it’s really fun,” Atkin explained.

Festival Honors also went to filmmaker Terry Gilliam. A prerecorded congratulatory message to Gilliam, featuring Johnny Depp in costume and in character as Captain Jack Sparrow, was a highlight.

Festival Honors
Each year, Festival Honors is one of the highlights of eDIT. This year’s Festival Honors presentation was held during a gala at the Cinestar Metropolis theater and attended by an estimated 1,500, including Hessian Prime Minister Roland Koch. This festive event boasted a red carpet entrance, awards ceremony and party featuring musical guest Marla Glen.

Previous recipients of Festival Honors include Roland Emmerich, Michael Ballhaus, Dante Ferretti, Dennis Muren, Vilmos Zsigmond, Phil Tippett, Peter Greenaway, Marco Müller, Tom Rolf, Bill Plympton, Emir Kusturica and other skilled storytellers.

This year’s recipients were Ray Harryhausen, who pioneered visual effects through such classic films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and Argonauts; and filmmaker Terry Gilliam, whose body of work includes Monty Python and Brazil.

An additional special achievement award was bestowed on Andy Serkis for showing “the filmmakers of our time how to excite life and soul in animation characters.”

This year, an additional special achievement award was bestowed on Andy Serkis, the talented actor who gave the motion capture performances that were the basis of CG characters Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Kong in King Kong. On this special award, festival organizers said Serkis “showed the filmmakers of our time how to excite life and soul in animation characters.”

As a surprise during Serkis’ award presentation in the packed theater, the presenter introduced a prerecorded video message from The Lord of the Rings and King Kong director Peter Jackson, who emphasized that Serkis brought the “heart and soul of the performance” to his CG characters. The video also included humorous clips of Serkis on set during production of the aforementioned films.

Serkis said during his acceptance speech that Jackson had “opened a new portal for visual effects” and he was “honored to have been part of that journey.”

Next, a prerecorded congratulatory message to Gilliam featuring Johnny Depp in costume and in character as Captain Jack Sparrow was a humorous moment. Nikolai Kinski presented the award to Gilliam and described the helmer’s work as “visionary filmmaking.”

One of last year’s Festival Honors recipients, Phil Tippett, saluted Harryhausen and his pioneering work in a taped presentation that included a montage of Harryhausen’s films and today’s effects film, demonstrating the influence that this early work had on the development of the visual effects and film industry.

Commenting on this montage, Atkin said, “The contemporary films and their visual effects represent thousands of digital artists working with highly sophisticated technology spending literally a century of man power hours and several hundred million dollars trying to duplicate what Ray Harryhausen did all by himself for all his films for less than the single visual effects budget of any of these other films. It truly boggles the mind when you see this work side by side.”

One of the evening’s most moving tributes came when Atkin then presented Festival Honors to Harryhausen.

“In Ray Harryhausen’s fantasy epic, Clash of the Titans, Zeus was portrayed by one of the greatest actors who ever lived, Sir Laurence Olivier. In the real world of visual effects storytelling, Ray Harryhausen is Zeus,” Atkin said. “Ray has entertained generations with his ability to take the art of stop motion animation to a level that has created characters and images, which have changed the course of contemporary filmmaking.”

Turning to Harryhausen, he concluded, “Ray Harryhausen, you are the best visual effects artist there has ever been or will be...it is just that simple.”