How a Beaufort County native helped create a creepy haunted house for a hit TV show

From Beaufort to Atlanta, Timmy O’Brien creates new worlds that manage to be pleasing to the eye while telling a story.

His passion for “making stuff” shows in his recent Emmy nomination for outstanding production design for a narrative program. He and his fellow production and design team members — Taylor Mosbey (art director) and Aimee Athnos (set decorator) — were nominated for their terrifying “haunted house” episode “Teddy Perkins” in the “Atlanta” television series.

Athnos and Mosbey both said O’Brien’s leadership style made it easy for them to do their best work on the set.

“As the set decorator, the production designer is your boss, and depending on who that production designer is, you either have a lot of creative input or you have none at all,” Athnos said. For this project, however, everyone on the team was open to any and all ideas, an approach that created an innovative, collaborative space, she said.

Beaufort residents might remember O’Brien for his work as a magician and his performances at the Beaufort Water Festival.

But how does someone go from crafting props and gags for magic shows to becoming an Emmy-nominated scenic designer?

Connecting the dots

When it comes to O’Brien’s career in scenic design, it seems like one thing simply led to another.

He started when he was in high school, joining a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. There, he teamed up with other members to make gag props and special effects for magic shows.

O’Brien soon realized he was born to “make things” and not “perform.”

He went on to study technical theater and design at University of South Carolina, where he fell in love with designing and crafting scenes. His original plans included becoming a special effects artist, building custom props or small models and miniatures. However, CGI and computer animation took over the film industry, so he went into scenic design.

After he graduated in the 1990s, O’Brien turned to the then small Atlanta movie industry.

By the mid-2000s, Atlanta’s TV and film industry was booming.

Today, it has become a Southern Hollywood.

“When I got there, there were relatively few people who worked in the film industry,” he said. “Most everybody did something else. Some of us worked doing theater, some of us did corporate trade shows and exhibit type work, but it was all still scenery-related.”

The film industry is all based on who you know, he said. Various projects led Athnos and Mosbey to O’Brien and, eventually, to joining the team for the second season of “Atlanta.”

Welcome to “Atlanta”

“Atlanta” comes from the mind of actor, comedian and rapper Donald Glover and a team of passionate people. It focuses on Atlanta’s hip-hop scene and is filmed exclusively in the city.

“Atlanta” received overwhelmingly positive reviews, staying in headlines for weeks when it debuted September 6, 2016.

The Observer said that “Atlanta” “depicts a truth of black experience unseen on TV.”

The Washington Post said that “Donald Glover’s hypnotic ‘Atlanta’ puts fresh eyes on a stereotyped world.”

Even The Atlantic called “Atlanta” “one of the most versatile shows on TV.”

“Atlanta” is a different from most TV shows, O’Brien said.

“We don’t tend to go to the same places, same locations or even same sets episode after episode,” he said. “A lot of our episodes are completely individual and one-off. We will never see some of those characters or some of those places ever again.”

Creating a scene

The spirit of collaboration across the production team helped turn an ordinary house in Buckhead into the creepy home of a reclusive musician.

The director told them to take inspiration from the Bette Davis’ film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” The eerie story of a strange, crazy recluse inviting an unsuspecting guest over helped the team bring out the house’s creep factor, Athnos said.

A lot of the framework for a terrifying “haunted house” episode was already there.

“Often with scenes, production is desperate to make their mark on a place,” Mosbey said. “(In) this house, we were allowed to let the elements stand out.”

However, some scenes and props had to be carefully crafted and planned, he said.

A piano that started trouble between one character and the recluse, as well as an elevator, were elements that needed to be crafted and, in one case, found. The piano, for example, was discovered on the side of the road by a production crew member.

“Everyone across the board was just super down to earth and passionate about what they were doing,” Athnos said. “I think we all think that we’re doing something innovative and different and kind of fresh; ... that’s really exciting because we get the opportunity to do things we’ve never done before.”

Even if you haven’t seen the entire series, you can watch the production crew’s imagination come to life in the haunting “Teddy Perkins” episode on Amazon and Fox.

The Emmys air Sept. 17. You can see the full list of nominees here.

This story was originally published August 1, 2018 at 9:13 AM.