We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elspeth Victoria Brown-Fitzgerald a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Elspeth Victoria, thanks for joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
It takes a strong mindset and an acknowledgement of priorities to be successful. Everyone’s definition of what “success” looks like and feels like is as unique as our fingerprints, but it is relative to what matters most in our lives.
For me, it’s conceptualizing creative projects, being inspired by the everyday moments with my two and half year old son Ragnar, nine month old daughter Aurelia, and working with the greatest person I know, my husband, James Fitzgerald. My work is a family affair, and we work diligently creating this lifestyle, so we can create content that we are passionate about, raise our children, and enjoy each milestone with them and one another.
The film industry is an unpredictable industry, which makes for extreme highs and lows. It’s stressful not knowing what the future holds, but there’s a possibility of great reward for taking high risks. This creates autonomy of our time, and having freedom with how we spend our time is what defines our success. By knowing what matters most, we are able to ride the waves of uncertainty with optimism because we are doing exactly what we are meant to do and raising a family, even if it means we won’t have a full night’s sleep for another decade or more. It’s worth it.
Elspeth Victoria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’ve always created stories and told them through an artistic medium. Growing up, I was training as a classical ballet dancer and started choreographing at a young age. I would listen to the classical music my father would be playing and I would write down little stories based on the story I saw while listening to the music. Then I would draw maps of how the dancers would create shapes and lines on stage. I would do this all of the time. I’ve always seen movement and color when I hear music or read a book.
In my twenties, I created a small dance dance theater company based in New York City, where I wrote, directed and choreographed original work based on philosophical concepts and performed the work throughout the city. We performed one of the original works at Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out series that was ordinary for big dance companies but extraordinary for small artistic experimental companies. I believed this was my artistic trajectory, dancing, creating, performing, and gaining more exposure throughout the dance world. The ball of mass was certainly moving in a strategic pathway, but gravity pulled the mass to a new orbit. I accidentally fell into the world of film.
This world was a foreign planet but similar enough that I could still breathe the air and walk without floating off into the stratosphere. I was dating someone that had his own production company while I was busy dancing and choreographing night and day. An array of unfortunate circumstances sent him away and forced him to abandon his responsibilities to his company. He’s suddenly gone, vanished. I had to figure out the ins and out of keeping his company alive while he was gone. I figured it out. I also saw that I was pretty good at it and loved the idea of creating in this new medium and realized all of the new opportunities it had, creating work that lives forever as a binary code in a digital world on a hard drive. I was starting to speak this new language and decided I will stay in this world and one day make my mark as an artist.
Years later, I met my husband. Less than one year after our first date, we were married in a castle in Ireland. We got back and started our own production company, Iron Rose Productions and have been doing work, life, family, and everything in between, together for nine years.
There’s many things that sets us apart as a company and the one main facet is that we are a one-stop, mom and pop shop. We are a small boutique production company that creates meaningful work and has the potential to make a difference in someone’s life. We aren’t looking to be the largest commercial production company or even an agency that churns out work with eyes on the bottom line. As I’ve stated before, knowing our priorities and what matters most, we strive to work with people, companies, brands, that are looking to make a difference and willing to take the leap of faith to push the artistic envelope and not go with cookie-cutter creators or marketing agencies. Because we do mostly everything in our literal house, we are extremely competitive with numbers compared to our capabilities. That makes it a win win for everyone. Companies are happy with the work, and we have our little helpers that are happy that they play with mom and dad everyday.
Between my husband and I, we have decades of professional film experience. There’s nothing we aren’t able to produce with our innovative production team of camera operators, designers, editors, and composers. I’m just the visionary, everyone else on the team brings the vision to life. Our body of work ranges from 15 and 30 second commercials to feature length films. I’ve worked within different industries in the commercial world, Beauty, Ballet Companies, Fashion Universities, and Healthcare. We have been fortunate with the opportunities and hope to continue branching out and working with industries that want to keep pushing their messaging to new heights with personal and captivating stories and visuals.
We recently filmed in Kansas to create two success stories for Aetna Better Health of Kansas. One of the stories was based on a member named Daniel. His story will cut you like a knife. He’s lucky to be alive. He’s had several brain injuries so nothing is said that isn’t thought about beforehand and there’s no irony. His voice is understated with a quiet disposition, and his eyes are the lightest shade of blue on the color wheel before entering the white center of the circle. Before we left, he said thank you for telling his story. I know that’s not profound in and of itself, but I could hear in his voice he had a great expectation that this could potentially help one person in the future. The sincerity in his voice was inspiring and emotional. It was this reminder that someone in the middle of the country is working hard everyday to be the person they are meant to be and hoping that their failures and achievement can lift someone out of their current struggle. I was moved and I hope others are too.
To say it’s been a roller coaster would be an understatement, but I wouldn’t erase the struggles since it has given us perspective to enjoy the incremental achievements with joy and acknowledgement that perseverance will always win in the end. It’s a strong bond we have knowing we have done it together and against all odds.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that you have the ability to structure how to spend time. As of today, we do not have the technological advancements to cut pathways through the fabric of spacetime to travel vast distances instantaneously, so we are all subject to the laws of classical physics and time itself has not been able to be commodified. Yet. So for now, being able to spend precious invaluable time in the way that matters most, is ideal.
There aren’t words to express the fulfillment I receive when I am with my family. Gazing in my children’s light blue eyes as they discover each new object, and the joy they have when the strings of the beloved music to Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” begins, and Ragnar dancing with the Party scene children in the First Act and Aurelia, almost 10 months, balancing on her own and taking her first baby steps, is a real life version of one of my favorite literature genres, magical realism. There is a hint of the fantastical in this everyday moment when you put yourself in their shoes and experience all five senses at once. An old man washing ashore with enormous wings might not occur, but witnessing wonderment in its purest form is significant in this realm. These moments make me a better artist. I realize that all these moments are meaningful and what seems to be mundane is actually the cornerstone to creativity and happiness.
There’s never a dull moment being a working filmmaker, full time mom, working with my husband who is also a full time dad, cooking all our food from scratch, renovating our home, and taking care of two litters of outdoor kittens, but I am constantly honing new skills, developing a new way of seeing the world that is making me a better storyteller. I am in seemingly chaos mode, but I know it’s more of a metamorphosis, and I will come out of this chapter with a new level of artistry. Being an artist isn’t for everyone for many good reasons, but as I stare into the dancing shadows in front of me, it’s all I know. I have the rest of my life to discover what motivates us to look behind and towards the originating light. But for now, I will continue to do my best and join my husband to take our children on our evening walk and start to wind down the day with the melodic background sounds of Downton Abbey.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The mission behind my creative journey is discovering how I can use my talent to serve others through storytelling. Playing my small role, I hope to ignite the transformative ability deep within that forces us to search for a meaningful purpose and pursue it, despite the obstacles and pain we will encounter. There’s beauty in learning and letting the knowledge germinate and blossom into new appreciation for who we are and what we have. You don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s worth discovering.
This quest for knowledge is a subtle reminder of how much I don’t know about anything, and that pushes me to try to learn and research new subjects everyday. It is a bit of a conundrum, the more you learn about the universe the more you realize you know absolutely nothing. It shouldn’t be discouraging but rather inspiring to try to understand how everything is connected. This leads me to create a unique sequence of events that tell a story. This is the greatest journey a creative could hope for, inspiring one to dream.
I’m excited to begin a new journey into the world of feature films. I believe as an artist, my job is to posit ideas that need further understanding. It’s akin to a constant seeking rather than a declarative statement that this is the answer you’ve been searching for. It’s quite an artistic departure from the commercial and testimonial world, and one that viewers will get a good “feeling” of who I am as an artist. There’s a lot that can be said in the details of set design, colors, themes, wardrobe, actors, sound design, and musical composition. Making a film is a work in progress and I don’t believe I’ll ever be “done” since it’s limitless what one can do, but I promise I will stop and share with everyone my first feature. It’ll be the first one and there will be more for people to draw more conclusions of how I see the world and ask questions more profound than sometimes we can imagine.
The creative journey is vast and wide and layered in many dimensions. One quote I like to contemplate that is seemingly simple is what Heraclitus once said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.”
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