With the eighth annual Ebertfest underway, Champaign has become host to a collection of overlooked films, as well as the people who made them and others in the film industry. One of them, Michael Wiese, is a native of Champaign.

Wiese, a publisher and film maker, has been invited from his home in Cornwall, England to speak at the festival and share his expertise with his seminar “Bringin’ It All Back Home: Principles of Independent Filmmaking” from 9-11:30 a.m., Saturday, April 29 at the Union.

Wiese will show clips from his short films and discuss the principles behind the clips with the crowd. He said he usually does the seminar for filmmakers to help them with their work. But when he first spoke at Ebertfest two years ago, he realized he had to speak to a wider crowd.

“(The audience) was a real mixed bag,” he said. “A third of the people were filmmakers and the rest were people just who had walked in the room. I thought this year I would serve both audiences.”

Associate dean at the College of Communications and Executive Producer of Ebertfest Nancy Casey said that a couple of years ago when Wiese came to Champaign to see the festival she and other representatives of the college asked him to do a seminar.

Now, along with the academic panels and discussions with moviemakers, Casey said Ebertfest is not only about discovering overlooked films.

“Basically, there’s an educational component to the whole film festival,” she said.

At the seminar, Wiese will show clips from his short films, including the 80-minute documentary “The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas” and “Hardware Wars,” a parody of “Star Wars.”

“Short films are normally portfolio pieces for beginning film makers,” Wiese said.

Wiese attended University High School and worked alongside Roger Ebert at the Daily Illini. At the time, Wiese was in high school and a photographer with the paper while Ebert was at the University and a reporter.

Wiese now owns a publishing company, Michael Wiese Productions, which specializes in “how to” books for filmmakers. When he wrote his first book about filmmaking, there was only one other book on the subject, he said.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “That’s what motivated me to write it.”

Now books about filmmaking have become an entire genre, Wiese said.

The filmmaker is currently working on a movie set in Bali. The story idea, a love triangle between a witch and two brothers, will be based on Wiese’s real-life experience when he traveled to Bali with a friend. The movie has gone through 34 scripts and four different writers, and 10 years later, is still in the works.

“Whatever the subject matter is, it’s something that I get involved with,” Wiese said. “I want to share it. So that’s really what the presentation is about.”