“Why don’t you go and write the book?”

I hadn’t even left school when I fell for my first love. Infatuated with the extensive ‘behind the scenes’ content that came out of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, my oldest friend and I set about making an hour-long ‘medieval romantic tragedy’ picture, replete with horses, knights and castles. This was long before YouTube existed, so everything we knew (which wasn’t a lot) we had learned from watching and re-watching Peter Jackson and his merry band of Kiwi rogues.