Getting Creative in The Film Lounge

Welcome and thank you for joining us as we visit with Iowa filmmakers whose works will be featured in the second season of “The Film Lounge,” which premieres on Iowa Public Television in February.

“The Film Lounge” is a television series that showcases short, independent films by Iowa artists. Season 2 includes 10 films that will air during two, one-hour episodes and cover a range of artistic formats, including documentary, experimental, narrative and animation.

Today, we’re talking with Kaitlyn Busbee of Iowa City and Ben Gardner and Juan Acuna Esparza, both of Des Moines, about their Film Lounge submissions and creative process. Each artist’s film addresses an aspect of artwork creation — how ideas are collected and analyzed, road blocks to creativity and consideration for the audience.

Busbee, who works in video marketing for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, is an award-winning filmmaker who shot “The Legend in My Heart” in Guangzhou, China, and a feature film, “These Hopeless Savages,” in seven days between Brooklyn, New York, and Iowa City.

With her Film Lounge entry, “Introspect” (2015), she was inspired by what she calls “the gaze” as she filmed dancer Elizabeth June Bergman.

“Western concert dance forms and narrative cinema have a history of women’s bodies being objectified and ‘gazed upon’ for pleasure,” she said. “‘Introspect’ explores what it means to view a dance not just performed in front of a camera, but rather performed for the camera, with all its implications.”

Here’s Busbee talking about her creative process, inspiration and philosophy:

Meanwhile, Gardner is a filmmaker and visual artist who is the Humanities Research Scholar at the Center for the Humanities at Drake University. He’s also planning a three-year multi-media project about cultures and how they are destroyed after shifts in power, such as the destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra by ISIS.

His Film Lounge submission, “Hallucination Dream Sequence” (2017), is a short animation based in a conversation about the phenomena of dreams, including the stages of falling asleep and waking up.

“The segments of this film are loops and cycle to refer to a trance state that I find relates to the process of going to sleep,” he said. “I think of these patterns as mantras, the circadian rhythm as well as cycles of self-realization, spiritual awakening and cosmological cycles.”

Here’s Gardner talking about his sources of inspiration for the creative process:

With “Lazy Bones, Lazy Bones” (2017), Esparza continues to perfect his skills with camera, sound and lighting techniques while exploring procrastination and not being happy with one’s work.

“For a while, I’ve been making experimental films, but not experimental in the student film type-of-way,” he said. “At face value, most of my videos probably look fairly pretentious but they are intentionally shallow with a pretty blunt meaning once you know it’s there.”

Over the next year, Esparza will be raising funding to produce his first feature-length film — a horror flick that takes advantage of the Midwest landscape.

Here’s Esparza talking about his creative process and future plans:

When it comes to filmmaking in Iowa, Busbee, Gardner and Esparza praised the development of the the state’s artistic community, its open spaces and welcoming atmosphere.

Here’s Busbee, again, talking about the arts and filmmaking in Iowa:

“The Film Lounge” second season’s Episode 201 will premiere at 10 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 11, and will be followed the next week with the premiere of Episode 202 at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 18, both on Iowa Public Television.

“The Film Lounge” is produced by Iowa Public Television in partnership with the Iowa Arts Council and Produce Iowa, the State Office of Media Production, both divisions of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs.

— Jeff Morgan, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs

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