Candlelit Pictures

Connor is from Lyttelton in the South Island. He was raised in a Baha’i family, played the piano from a young age and attended Rudolf Steiner School. In the opening days of studying at the Broadcasting School in Christchurch, the earthquake struck causing a drastic change in the curriculum and landscape. The final days of his study involved coming full circle by working on the recreation of the earthquakes through Gaylene Preston’s mini-series Hope and Wire. Connor met some of the Candlelit team at a conference prior to moving to Auckland in 2013 and fell in with them soon after.

A self-confessed luddite, Connor has a passion for celluloid and magnetic tape. He takes analogue photographs and records his music onto cassettes. This interest is much more than nostalgia, since he’s not old enough to have encountered tapes and film until he was already an adult. For Connor these ‘antiquated’ methods of recording pictures and sounds are more about the limitations and unexpected outcomes that make his work into an interaction with the photochemical process.

Collaborative by nature, Connor is involved with almost every Candlelit Pictures project in some way or another. Capable of doing pretty much anything, and with a generous heart, he gets pulled-in a lot for everything from film editing to tech support to camera operating. He also directs under the alias Juicy JPEG with Finn McGowan and Al Wad.

You will often find Connor eating breakfast late in the afternoon having spent all night editing. As he likes to say, “ABC – Always Be Cutting!”

Connor loves the cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson, the literature of Thomas Pynchon, the photography of Bruce Gilden, and the music of Kendrick Lamar.