Benjamin Kasulke thinks in image, in working method, in environment. "They’re all sort of tied together in this spirit of collaboration. I feel like a project is successful, at least the production end of it is successful, if you bring together individuals that bring all these collaborative talents together and they create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts," he explains.

Spotlighted by South By Southwest Film Festival premieres of both Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance and Joe Swanberg's Nights and Weekends this year, Kasulke's work sketches beauty built of clean lines and fluidity, its implicit message of unassuming tenderness and poignance.

Well before the announcement of the IFC Festival Direct release of My Effortless Brilliance this Wednesday, Kasulke and filmmaker Barry Jenkins sat down to chat about the freedom of the digital revolution, the importance of capturing new visual stimuli and the DIY approach of translating ideas to images.

The following interview adds to Jenkins' ongoing series, the preceding pieces with cinematographers Brett Jutkiewicz and Asif Siddiky.

SM: So, just give me a little bit of background, like your training.

BK: I did four years of undergrad film school at Ithaca College in upstate New York. I graduated in 99’, and before graduating I did some time at FAMU, the Czech National Film School in a program called the 3F program that was centered on the history of Czech New Wave and the Czech model of film production.

SM: What’s it feel like to be a DP on one of these DIY, these “smaller” films? It’s not like 40 years ago where you had to be a guy who went into the camera house and worked in the equipment room, and then you got to be a loader, and then a 2nd AC and then a 1st AC, etc., whereas you can just get together with a filmmaker like Lynn Shelton and go out and make a movie.

BK: I think it’s very interesting; I meet a lot of cinematographers and directors of photography and videographers out on the festival circuit, and they’re young, and they would be young for almost any industry but they’re really young in the context of either a classic Hollywood or European DP and…it’s strange, you know, to be lucky enough to have tools that just came out at a certain time. I think that the generation that came before us — I say us, I mean people in their 20s and 30s right now — the people that came before us probably had 16mm film and that got them out into the streets and out of the studio and out of the lighting environment. And now, Panasonic with the DVX100 really changed the way you could make films, you could see what exposures were gonna look like in the world of video, but you could get a look that looked like film so you weren’t compromising visuals as much. There’s always gonna be the video/film debate, but—

Chewing the last bits of cheese off a cold piece of pizza, Lena Dunham puts aside a final college paper for the hour. She's been working on it a while.

“Is the pizza still as good four hours later as it was four hours ago?” I ask.

“Totally not! I was working and somehow couldn’t focus on the pizza, but I feel guilty being like, ‘Well, your life is just over.’”

The personification, oddly enough, isn't jarring. In the playful mind of Dunham, where absurdity, humor and meaningfulness all take turns downstage, the comment comes across with the same childlike truthfulness as her energetic iterations of "That's so interesting!" and "I'm so glad..." She says this herself later, that there's a quality kept almost adolescent in her personality.

Filmmaker Tom Quinn cares about how people get by, how they work hard to make life better, how it’s often a struggle to do that and how, in a state of quiet transcendence, life is born of those challenges. “I’m definitely interested in making working class films and basically being a working class filmmaker,” Quinn says. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, in the same way that my dad was a carpenter and a craftsperson but also made things that were artistic and beautiful.”

In the second part of our interview with the filmmaker, recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, we continue to explore the making of Quinn’s Slamdance lauded The New Year Parade. Over the course of three years, Quinn, along with everyman crew member Mark Doyle and a dedicated cast, rehearsed, improv’d, studied and finally lived inside the world of a family in the midst of breakdown.

Here Quinn speaks about shooting in Philadelphia, the growing film movement in the region and his hopes for the future of his work, Quinn saying, “Ideally it would be great if I could have a body of work that feels unified, even if it’s five or six low-budget films like this. I would feel really good if I could figure out a way to keep doing that.”

The funny, smart, poignant universe of Lena Dunham developed first through her shorts and the Nerve.com Web series Tight Shots, but a distillation of her concerns is perhaps best seen in her feature debut Creative Nonfiction.

Starring as the film's lead, Dunham plays Ella, a somewhat wide-eyed creative whose college entanglements with sometimes love interest Chris (David Unger) and tenuous, quick-to-betray friend Carly (Slaine Jenkins) inform the work of her still developing screenplay. As the two stories are told simultaneously, the real life, digi-framed angst of Ella's crush and burn and the poetic, film grained narrative of her screenplay, Creative Nonfiction lives within realms of the humorous and bittersweet, exploring without bashfulness or shame the difficulty and absurdity of growing up.