Recently, I attended a friend/ former classmate’s birthday. We both went to university together and met at an acting class required by our film school.

When she was working on her thesis film, her production company needed background sounds from Hong Kong because the crew wasn’t able to capture it well on audio. As serendipity would have it, my Production Management professor was the production company’s head doing the post for her film. I was negotiating my attendance with him because of a planned trip (his class was only once a week.)

“Where are you heading?” he asked.

“Hong Kong.” Perfect, he had said. It was time for a bargain, so he hooked me up with a recorder, a dead cat, and a list of what to record from Hong Kong’s soundscape. For some reason, I always ended up as the sound ops for our productions in film school so I wasn’t fazed by the assignment. My professor also made sure to give me a quick brush-up on sound recording. He was also my Sound Professor, and as good as he was, he skipped more classes than his students and would give a grand lecture towards the end of the semester.

After a day on the island, I headed out to Kowloon where most of the locals seemed to live. I dedicated an entire day to recording the sound list. I went to a park at night and recorded the footsteps of people on the sidewalks, and the roads. I sat on the bus holding out my recorder and gigantic headphones unabashedly even as the locals stared. It was a meditative moment amongst the bustling of a busy city filled with people living busy lives.

I watched my friend’s film shown on the big screen, as I heard the undertones of the city I had recorded on tape. It’s lovely, I thought, how I could be part of something bigger. It felt like a gift to see something come to life and have a part of that creation.

After film school, I did a few years of working until I decided to pursue a diploma in Journalism while my friend jumped from being a producer for a broadcast company to working as a digital nomad and then travelling through Europe.

Today she asked me if I ever considered going back to film. I thought about it, I told her. I would want to but it’s not something I prioritize these days. My filmmaking has become the reels I post on instagram, the imagery I juxtapose with music. There are no dialogues, no scripts. Maybe I’ll come back to it but it was nice to be reminded about our young selves, all the adventures and little backstories along with all the skills we’ve accumulated until now, even when the Canadian job landscape is so. . . dry.