eDIT: The Filmmaker's Festival celebrated its 10th birthday in Frankfurt, Germany. The event provides a platform to enhance the process of filmmaking in the digital age. All images courtesy of eDIT.

The 10th anniversary of eDIT: The Filmmaker's Festival, which took place Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 at CineStar Metropolis in Frankfurt, Germany, clearly provided a wide platform to enhance the process of filmmaking in the digital age. The tone for this year was to continue to evolve with the ever-changing art and science of filmmaking with the understanding that it still begins with story and character.

As always, the event began with its focus on animation and vfx. Sunday was reserved for screenings of animation, shorts and other stories compiled from film festivals and production events around the world.

The program started with a screening of selected shorts from the 2007 Bitfilm Festival, which just handed out their annual awards at their Sept. 27 gala in Barcelona. Festival Director Moritz Hirchenhain introduced the program, which included a number of interesting films, including Blur's A Gentlemen's Duel, Aliaksei Tserakhau's Capital, The Mustache Contest by Mike Hollingsworth and Ben Hinton's highly stylized Code Hunters done for MTV Asia. Founded in 2000, the Bitfilm Festival is an annual event celebrating excellence in 3D animation, digital vfx and Flash movies.

PES lead an interactive Q&A discussing his body of work. Attendees were also treated to a complete collection of his wonderful short films.

The program followed with the Avoid Eye Contact 1, a selection of films by top independent animators in New York. Highlights included Patrick Smith's Delivery, a starkly brutal portrayal of two men's violent struggle to take possession of a parcel just delivered to their house, the hilarious Sub by Jesse Schmall and PES' famous Roof Sex.

The crowd then was treated to a complete collection of the wonderful short films of PES, a stop-motion animator whose hilarious and innovative works are some of the most virally distributed films online. Highlights included Roof Sex, Game Over and Kaboom. Bill Plympton followed with a curated showing of some of his short films, including his most recent Shuteye Hotel. Bill always delights crowds wherever he goes, mixing bits of background information and his insight into the animation process while discussing his uniquely animated sense of humor and storytelling. Bill's films have been delighting animation fans for years and this screening was no exception.

I followed with a program of shorts curated with AWN President Ron Diamond, as part of our annual "Animation Show of Shows" program. In its eighth year, the ASOS brings together top animated shorts from around the world into a program that tours top studios, associations and schools around the U.S. A packed Kino 3 theater watched four of the five Oscar nominated and winning films this year, including Geza Toth's Maestro, Disney's The Little Matchgirl and Torrill Kove's Academy Award-winning The Danish Poet. As a special treat, I showed one of the latest films from the National Film Board of Canada, Madame Tutli-Putli, a 17-minute stop-motion visual tour-de-force.