Know Your Neighbor: Tim O'Connor, filmmaker

Image and videos courtesy of Ceremony Films

While some people spend half their lives trying to figure out where their passion lies, Tim O’ Connor discovered his in middle school. Tim, a budding filmmaker, had not one but two of his short films screened in the Student Film and Video Festival, held at the Princeton Public Library this summer.

Tim said, “I think I knew going in to high school that I wanted to do movie stuff…  I went to West Windsor Plainsboro North High School and there’s a program called broadcast writing, which is basically TV, movie and radio in one big conglomeration. It was the best; I did it all four years of high school. I made movies and my friends and I got a TV program started there. I had my own radio show in the morning and, it was great, I learned a ton. “

Now at Vassar, and in the film program, Tim has gained invaluable film experience and has learned in unexpected ways. He explained, “At Vassar the film program is, particularly in the beginning, much more geared towards theory and history, which is extremely important. Learning about filmmakers and the things that came before you is crucial to making films. But a lot of the production experience I got is through the Vassar filmmakers which is a student organization at Vassar and I’ve worked with kids that are older than me that are now off in the graduate school or in the film world, which was great.”

Tim’s films that were screened in the Student Film and Video festival were made at Vassar. Entitled “The Thing in the Lake” and “Gum Glut Morning,” Tim described them as similar to the Blue Valentine style (a film written and directed by Derek Cianfrance). Tim said, “I kind of took the aesthetics [of Blue Valentine] and tried to do something in that vein which was different, you know I usually have some kind of supernatural or little weirder twist in them.”

Both “The Thing in the Lake” and “Gum Glut Morning” are eerie, silent films. In “The Thing in the Lake” a young man discovers an unidentifiable object at a lake, which slowly consumes him. This year “The Thing in the Lake” was the last film shown in the festival, which is considered an honor. Tim described it as “based on HP Lovecraft story- cosmic horror archetypes, curious man goes into world and tries to find out about something and it drives him crazy. ““Gum Glut Morning” is similarly sinister, as a young girl must choose a life of crime or the loss of her boyfriend.

Tim’s film “Tinnitus,” which was shown at the film festival last year, also contained a somewhat bizarre twist in the plot. In “Tinnitus,” “This guy who has this ringing in his ear… can’t get rid of this ringing, so he takes a spoon and digs it out of his ear and it turns out to be a squid,” said Tim.

For the next year Tim will be working on his senior thesis movie, which he wants to be a narrative rather than a documentary. He explained, “For the first semester we will be writing scripts, and of the 15 or 20 scripts, 3 or 4 will be chosen. Hopefully mine will be chosen, but if not, I’ll just make it on my own.” Tim’s ultimate goal is to be a director in Hollywood. He added, “I don’t really have a back-up plan, it’s this or I don’t know…I’m hoping for the best but it’s a pretty aggressive industry, the film world.”