Naperville filmmaker part of festival in St. Charles
October 8, 2009
By DAVID SHAROS For The Sun
The Illinois International Film Festival, which will be held Oct. 23 to 25 in St. Charles, will feature student films on the big screen for a local audience to enjoy.
Naperville's Benjamin Cline will be one of the featured filmmakers. Cline's "Urn Doctor M.D.," created by Cline and other students from Chicago's Flashpoint, The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, will be among the highlights of the weekend-long film festival.
Flashpoint students, including Naperville's Benjamin Cline, work on the set of "URN Doctor, M.D." submitted photo
Benjamin Cline submitted photo
"Urn Doctor M.D." was part of the Chicago 48 Hour Film Project, an international film competition held last June. The Flashpoint school was approached by Cline and company and agreed to sponsor them in the competition. The movie wound up taking first place in four categories, including Best Actor, Best Editing, Best Cinematography and People's Choice for Best Picture.
According to Cline's mother, Naperville resident Tina Cline, her 21-year-old son showed a hankering for film work years ago.
"Ben saw this Bill Murray film years ago called 'Lost in Translation' when he was maybe in the ninth grade, and a lot of kids as well as adults hated it," Tina said. "I remember Benjamin loving it. He talked about the lights and cameras angles and all that stuff. He really got it."
Cline, who worked as the editor on "Urn," teamed up with colleagues for a whirlwind film experience, producing a short film in just 48 hours time.
"It was sort of like the 'Iron Chef' of filmmaking," Tina said. "The assignment involved having to use an urn in the film, a doctor and a certain line that had to be said. The task was to come up with a script, a cast, shoot and edit the film, and have it completed in two days."
Cline, who has relocated to Los Angeles, said the film is a comedy, which wound up being a fortuitous genre for the film team.
"We talked among ourselves before the competition about what genre we'd like to work in, and we wound up picking comedy, which many of us had worked in before," he said. "I think the film won the awards it did because we tried to follow a comic-book format. It was tightly edited with a lot of quick shots, and the lead actor in the film was just incredible and really charismatic."
The plot of the comedy involves a widow whose husband's ashes lie in an urn in the house. While at home, the widow gets a little rambunctious and knocks the urn over, breaking it. In a sort of psychic moment, an "urn" doctor who was trained at the Urn Academy senses the mishap and immediately appears at the widow's door and successfully puts the urn and ashes back together.
Cline said his younger brother Kevin is currently studying film as well at the University of Colorado. He hopes the two will be filmmakers together.
"I realize that goal is a way off, but hopefully it will come to pass," Cline said.
For budding filmmakers, Cline said there are two principles he himself has followed which should give those interested in the field a leg up on the competition.
"You should watch as many movies as you possibly can, and you'll find that even subconsciously, you'll learn a great deal," he said. "The other tip is to start making movies. Get a camcorder and start shooting every chance you get."
The Illinois International Film Festival will take place at the Arcada Theater, 105 E. Main St., St. Charles.
Visit www.illinoisinternationalfilmfestival.com , where you can watch many of the submitted films.