Jim McQuaid (Director, Screenwriter, Producer)

"A generalist doing an imitation of a specialist,” Jim McQuaid’s career spans the arts and the sciences.

He has an MFA degree in photography and he has worked in Marketing Communications for high tech companies in networking and semiconductors. He ran an Oral History Project at the George Eastman House and he is an author of the Internet Engineering Task Force document, RFC 1944, which is about network performance testing. All of these helped prepare him for the challenges of digital video production.

While never completing his high school film about alienated suburban youth (1200’ of 8mm film), he did manage to complete a 16mm film which parodied high school life. In recent years he has made more than twenty short films through the loosely structured co-op, Turnip and has contributed to the rich local filmmakers scene in North Carolina via collaboration and "doing lunch."

His films are characterized by a high regard for important moments of connection and insight in everyday life. McQuaid's films have been embedded in the grain of everyday life, even a docudrama about the end of cheap oil (After The Peak (2007)). Roger and Tatum represent perhaps the most light-heart approach to the problems of everyday human affairs. He believes that we are never more serious than when we joke.