Unorthodox. That is the simplest term to describe Georgia State student/ filmmaker/DJ Zachary Timms and his winding trek to graduation.
“Zack has always been a thinker, a dreamer and a bit of a rebel, so it was natural that he would not take an orthodox path,” said Braeden Fields, Timms’ long-time friend and co-founder of their non-profit, Homage to Humanity.
This May, after seven years as an undergraduate, Timms will receive degrees in both political science and film. Self proclaimed as “GSU’s Van Wilder,” Timms’ intricate expedition weaves everywhere from Australia’s mass coral reef to stages in front of hundreds of screeching fans.
The Journey Begins
Timms discovered his passion for film early, working professionally at just 17. He graduated high school with a clear vision for the future, but lacked the academic standing to make it happen.
“Honestly, I wanted to be a Georgia State film student from the beginning, but I never really got good grades in high school,” Timms said.
Timms went to a community college for a semester and then transferred to UGA as a transient student.
Over the next few years, Timms found himself at a string of universities, studying everything from business to forestry. For the next few years he bounced back and forth from colleges in the Athens area to study abroad programs in New England and Australia. By the time returned from Australia in 2009, his diverse transcript made up for his academic downfalls.
“By the time I finished, I’d gone to Gainesville State, University of Georgia, Lincoln College, Christ Church Polytechnic in New Zealand and James Cook University in Australia. When I went back to Athens I had this awesome transcript, so I used that to apply to Georgia State and they snapped me right up.”
Extensive knowledge of shrubbery and native conservation tactics weren’t the only thing he brought back from his Australian travels. While down under, he fell in love with the high energy electronic dance music (EDM) culture, which lead to the next chapter in his saga.
Local Celebrity
“I had my mind blown by electronic music in Australia, so when I came back, I became evangelical about promoting electronic music,” Timms explained.
In an effort to bring the EDM culture to Atlanta, Timms took up an opportunity to work on WRAS. He eventually took over the Subterranean Drum and Bass show under the moniker DJ Zack “Rocket.” The show gained traction when he began to play the newest electronic genre dubstep, which in 2009 was virtually unheard of.
“I was the first person to play dubstep in the Southwest on the radio, and that’s when the show started to blow up,” Timms said.
In the program’s two-month stint on the air, the 2-hour set averaged about 150-200 callers and over 50,000 eager listeners. Catapulted into local dubstep celebrity, Timms began taking gigs in Atlanta’s growing rave scene.
At the height of the show’s success, Timms was put on probation for having an unauthorized guest into the studio. While on probation he aired a questionable pre-recorded sound effect called “Babbling Brook with Man Coughing,” which he now admits was a bong rip. This airing sealed his fate at the radio station.
Tour Life
After losing the gig at WRAS, surfacing family issues lead to the loss financial support of his parents, forcing him to quit school.
Rather than picking up a dead-end job, he used his previous experience at WRAS and growing reputation as a DJ to land a job at Unique Squared, a growing professional audio e-tailer.
“I joined Unique Squared to produce videos for their DJ equipment. I ended up going on tour with a bunch of awesome bands, meeting a bunch of famous people and filming just some of the coolest stuff,” Timms said.
His position as a multimedia producer put him in charge of not only managing the company’s media content but also producing hundreds of videos for huge artist like Avicci, Kaskade and Nervo.
With wide-eyed nostalgia, he recalls his exploits traveling on Unique Squared’s mobile studio, taking the stage before acts to the hundreds or screeching fans and eating lunch next to EDM legends Swedish House Mafia. But he soon found himself wanting more.
“Unique Squared parlayed my Djing into bigger events, and that’s how I got to play in places like Miami and the Brooklyn hip hop festival. Things were going really well, and I realized I’d hit a wall and that I wanted more,” Timms said.
Timms felt that he hit a wall in income level, and that the only way to pass it was to finish up his degree. He returned to Georgia State, but found himself unable to take upper-level film classes because of his poor GPA.
“The only time I got really good grades was when I was in a political science course, and I started to think maybe I should just take more of these. By the time I got my grades back up to finish my film degree, I had enough for a political science major,” Timms explained.
Next Chapter
After two and a half years back in school, feeling the pressure of impending graduation, Timms secured a promising job as a social media manager.
“This job was a huge career move, and it was good until I realized that the company had internal policies that I fundamentally and morally disagreed with, so I resigned,” Timms said.
The sour experience in the private sector politicized Timms, who went back to work on a full-time on project called Homage to Humanity.
“Since we were kids, Zack and I have always wanted to do something. The need is best described as a burden of empathy,” Fields said.
“We saw global issues being framed in ways that we found disingenuous and saw need to crowd source media content and kind of serve as a soapbox to those who were experiencing adversity.”
Fields had already nurtured thesocial media activist platform to 32,000 Twitter followers, and with Timms’ previous experience, the team were ready to use those numbers to push their message forward.
“Zack is an expert in social media, and we vibrate on the same wavelength,” Fields said.
“He does a lot the networking with targeting with social media because he has a lot more experience in that area, and he is quite motivator.”
Homage to Humanity has grown significantly in the last few months. The organization’s first project is a crowd-funding campaign called Helmets 4 Humanity, which will raise money for Kevlar helmets to send to unprotected protesters in countries like Keiv and Venezuela.
“Our goal is to get the investments to travel the world and do a mini documentary series highlighting human right issues,” Fields explained.
“We’d really like to use a series of crowd-funding campaigns to fill needs as we see them arise.”
Despite Timms’ position at growing a non-profit and diverse experiences around the world, he is still as uncertain as any student about his next move.
“I guess I’m just trying leverage my experience to get a job that will make me money and allow me to still work with Homage 2 Humanity. I just know I want to dedicate my life to peace and human rights.”
