By Carolyn Giardina

FRANKFURT --

Visual effects pioneer Phil Tippett–who founded Berkeley, Calif.-based feature and commercial effects house Tippett Studio–received Festival Honors at the eDIT8 Filmmakers Festival, held Oct. 8-11 in Frankfurt, which featured a three-day schedule of events with emphasis on commercial and feature work, as well as emerging techniques such as the digital intermediate (DI) process.

The advertising sessions were well attended–no surprise considering the city of Frankfurt boasts a sizable number of ad agencies, commercial production and post houses, as well as Europe’s second largest airport and a busy train station. Another magnet that drew advertising’s elite to Frankfurt last week was the German Association of Advertising Spot Producers (vdw), which in cooperation with eDIT handed out their 2005 vdw Awards before 400 guests at a gala presentation and celebration on the eve of eDIT’s opening day (see related story, p. 1).

eDIT–which is staged in conjunction with the Visual Effects Society (VES)–is a project of the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts, the regional initiative hessen-media, the Hessian Institute of Private-Sector Broadcasting (LPR Hessen) and the city of Frankfurt am Main under the patronage of Udo Corts, Hessian minister of science and the arts. Prime Minister Roland Koch estimates that there are some 80,000 working in media in the state, and one of the festival’s goals is to “develop the sector and make it fit for the future.”

eDIT has been growing each year in size and scope–and it is fast becoming a leading international industry event that offers much education and networking. This year, the event experienced increased participation of almost 50 percent over the previous year. In addition to the 2,300 professional visitors, there were 350 guests from the media industry, politics and business, along with roughly 130 international speakers and 120 journalists. An estimated 800 attended the Festival Honors gala, during which Tippett and distinguished actor Armin Mueller Stahl were bestowed Festival Honors–eDIT’s highest accolade.

Tippett has earned two Academy Awards–for the visual effects on Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park–and two Emmys during a career that has spanned more than 25 years. His company’s noted commercial work includes the character animation on the comedic Blockbuster “Carl & Ray” campaign from Young & Rubicam, New York, which features a rabbit and a guinea pig in a pet shop located near a Blockbuster store.

Tippett’s direction began at the age of seven when he first watched visual effects legend Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion classic The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Highlighting the Festival Honors presentation, Harryhausen appeared in a surprise video clip during which he congratulated Tippett on receiving Festival Honors. The clip concluded with one of the stop motion skeletons that battled in Harryhausen’s Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, who also “offered congratulations.”

“It was Ray whose Seventh Voyage of Sinbad sent me on this life in cinema nearly fifty years ago, on the way to receiving this great honor,” said Tippett, who was visibly surprised and moved when he saw the clip.

As part of their recognition, Tippett and Mueller-Stahl–whose credits include Avalon, Night on Earth and Shine (for which he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor)–were inducted into the German Film Museum’s Wall of Fame, a permanent installation that represents those awarded Festival Honors annually by eDIT. In the display, they join previous honorees director Peter Greenaway, cinematographers Michael Ballhaus, ASC and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC; visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, ASC; editor Tom Rolf, ACE; production designer Dante Ferretti and legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

The actual display–in the foyer of the Frankfurt-based museum–features items donated by the awardees as a symbol of their work, which are exhibited in glass cases on concrete columns.

 

FESTIVAL CONTENT

This year, the eDIT Festival widened its focus somewhat, reflected in the change of the event tagline from “Storytelling in the Digital Age” to “Filmmaker’s Festival.”

“The art and science of creating moving images have continued to change and grow, providing today’s filmmakers with new tools which have altered the filmmaking landscape,” explained festival directors Sebastian Popp, Rolf Kramer, and Tom Atkin (who is the founder of VES) in a released statement. “And so our new name The Filmmaker’s Festival is designed to reflect both the new artistry and digital technology of storytelling, while at the same time acknowledging and discussing traditional production elements that have always served as the foundation of filmmaking.”

“Visual effects are still a primary focus of the festival,” Atkin added. “But we are dealing with storytelling– so we are covering the collaborative process with a focus on visual effects.”

The opening day was designed to focus on advertising. One eDIT-hosted session–held in cooperation with SHOOT and chaired by this reporter (who is SHOOT‘s senior editor, technology and postproduction)–showcased visual effects in commercials and included one of the most honored commercials in recent years.

Darren Price, head of 3-D at London’s Nexus Productions, presented the making of Honda Diesel’s “Grrr” via Wieden+Kennedy in London, directed by Nexus’s directing team Smith & Foulkes. This animated :90 received tremendous recognition this year, having earned accolades including the Grand Prix from Cannes, the Grand Clio, Best of Show at The One Show, the Grandy from the Andys, and the Best of Show at the Shark Awards.

Price dissected the production, and also reviewed how the spot came to be, discussing the early meetings at the agency and showing early designs for the look of the ad. “Grrr” tells a story through an original song and colorful animation of a Honda engineer who hated standard diesel engines–so he developed something quieter and more efficient. The spot features the old standard diesels flying through an animated world populated with rainbows and bunnies, who try to eliminate the noisy engines. The spot asks, “Can Hate Be Good?” In the case of Honda, the answer is yes.

Frank Petzold, visual effects supervisor at Tippett Studio, showcased some of the character work on commercials that is coming out of the studio, including the aforementioned “Carl & Ray” Blockbuster campaign and a Milka chocolate campaign out of Ogilvy, Frankfurt, which required a large amount of detailed character animation, as well as compositing into a live-action environment.

Rounding out the session, Frankfurt-based Carsten Bohlefeld, managing director/producer, Laterna Magica, and Thomas Kutschera, senior 3-D artist, VCC Perfect Pictures (which is newly named Seed), presented a breakdown of the shots in a German commercial that featured a dancing sheep created with motion capture and 3-D.

That same day, during “The Next Generation of Computer Games,” Electronic Arts’ studio art director Henry LaBounta took his audience through some of the latest computer games for Xbox and Playstation, featuring real-time animation, interactivity and heightened realism. His examples demonstrated the strong connection between games and advertising, with major brands a focal point of the content in each. LaBounta showcased EA’s “Need for Speed,” a car chase featuring a BMW; “NBA Live ’06,” which puts NBA players and teams in startlingly realistic recreations of different arenas around the country; and “FIFA ’06,” similarly featuring soccer’s elite.

eDIT 8 also featured sessions on the making of features, including presentations from companies very much active in spot production. Those included Kingdom of Heaven, presented by Gary Brozenich, CG supervisor, The Moving Picture Company (MPC), London; Sin City, presented by David Evner, co-founder of the Santa Monica-based ComputerCafe Group and director of CafeFX’s creative team; and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, presented by Chas Jarret, CG supervisor at MPC, and VFX supervisor Nick Davis. As well, Batman Begins was dissected by: Rudi Holzapfel, VFX supervisor at MPC; Oliver Hames, R&D supervisor at Double Negative, London; and Stephane Ceretti, digital artist and VFX supervisor, BUF Compangnie, Paris.

 

DI FOCUS

eDIT also placed emphasis on emerging digital techniques, this year with a half-day track on the Digital Intermediate (DI) process–essentially the process of digitizing all filmed materials for color grading and post in the digital realm, leading to the creation of a digital master that is used to create all deliverables. Speakers included Ted Gagliano, president of feature postproduction at Fox in Hollywood; Alex Ho, producer of such films as Hotel Rwanda, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Platoon; Michael Underwood, colorist on Hotel Rwanda and of Hollywood-based post house Post Logic; Henning Raedlein, director of DI at Munich’s Arri TV post facility; and director of photography Gavin Finney, VP of the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC). This reporter moderated the discussion.

Immediately following the discussion, Post Logic’s head of marketing Mary Reardon chaired a case study on Hotel Rwanda, narrated by Ho and Underwood. Underwood’s presentation included a primer on data and the importance of a developed workflow, and while his focus was feature work, some of the concept could be applied to developing commercial workflows. “It is necessary to be able to move the data as quickly as possible to the different workstations that need access to it; for instance, sending the scans to conforming and later to color grading,” he said. “It always seems that filmmakers like to make changes to the edit during the final grading, so data moves back and forth between conforming and color correction many times–In our work flow we will sometimes have three copies of the data in use and moving around the facility though our SAN [Storage Area Network].”

“At 2k resolution, a feature film could use up to 2 TB of storage,” Underwood explained. “4k data is another matter. 4k is 4 four times [the amount of data] as 2k The reason for this is that both the horizontal and vertical pixel sizes are doubled. Computationally, the 4k data require much more time, storage space and firepower.”

The next eDIT Filmmaker’s Festival will take place in Frankfurt from Sept. 24-26, 2006.

MySHOOT Profiles