It began with my dad’s 8mm projector. When I was ten my father would let me play projectionist for the movie nights my parents put on at our house. I was hooked right from the start. The projector was one of the first mechanical things I was allowed to play around with and I loved it: I loved threading the film, the feel of the metal teeth of the intermittent sprocket, the rapid-fire hum of the projector’s motor and the acetate smell of the film and how it bubbled on screen when a piece got caught in the gate.

I still love all of those things. During our family movie nights we’d screen Hong Kong action films that my father had bought in his early twenties when he studied and taught Win Chun Kung Fu. He mainly had Bruce Lee films, but there were others with titles such as Fists of the Double Kthat were extremely low-budget and extremely cool. The projector had a condenser microphone that you could plug straight into the audio socket and record directly onto the film’s soundtrack, so these movie nights weren’t just for watching, our whole family and friends would take turns dubbing the voices of the characters and adding sound effects during the fight scenes.