My earliest toy, apart from Marty, the orange toy cat, was this. A toy camera with a cartridge that held super 8 films and I played with them winding forwards and then backwards, (mostly backwards), then frame by frame - painfully slowly, so I could see Pluto's paws change. I still have it. The three minute film was called 'Lonesome Ghosts'.

I also had a toy slide projector that I used to project onto a ceiling on the polystyrene tiles of my bedroom. I loved the light and colour. A long strip of coloured plastic with a cartoon strip, pushed through a slot by hand, over a big plastic torch. It was the light that I loved. Coloured light in the dark.

I found I loved film and watched all these mostly on TV: Hammer Horror, St Trinian's, Theatre of Blood, Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the cinema, Tales from the Crypt. Christoper Lee. Peter Cushing. Escape. Years of late pre teen Friday nights, in a pre video nasty TV horror world. What harm could Beryl Reid, biker friends and toads in Psychomania ever do to a 8 year old boy?

Then, around aged 12, I was 'educated' by BBC2 and Radio 3, watching films, mostly with subtitles, Buñuel, Eisenstein, and later Cocteau. 'Orpheé' and 'The Exterminating Angel' remain favourites. Then drifting into science fiction film fantasy festivals showing 'Fearless Vampire Killers' and being dazzled by big eyeballs in '200l: Space Oddessy' and not really knowing why the film started with monkeys. Then punk...and music, free jazz, Company, Derek Bailey, 'plinky plonk', Monk, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Smith, Steve Reich, Throbbing Gristle, Stockhausen, Furious Pig, madrigals and lots of rare groove and 2nd hand records.

And Super 8 – rolls and rolls unseen still. Red and yellow paper packets of Kodachrome 50, rolls that I did not see for years.Then Film Makers Co-op in Gloucester Road, Scala All-nighters; Russ Meyer, Pasolini, Warhol, Eraserhead, 'Thundercrack', and ICA, Hitchcock in 3D, Kenneth Anger, and onwards. Then the internet.

By 1996 I was writing HTML, coding designing by day, and editing 'Wake'on a 4 plate 16mm Steenbeck at night in a squat in North London. The two did not meet. They connected for me when I was initially loaned, and loaned again then was finally given 'Expanded Cinema' by Gene Youngblood. I was making mandalic film and found a 'missing' history of ideas combining film and technology. Films escaping the frame, intermedia events, films as psychology; Jordan Belson, John Stehura and Whitney Brothers.

Why a 'film maker'?

Because now I am cursed or blessed with forever having to make the moving image come alive and lodge inside peoples heads and stay there, and for it then to mutate and fester in their heads and trigger their own dreams and not mine.