At the start of Mark Holtze's YouTube videos, a hand is shown preparing the very film projector he dug out from his parents' home in December, which he says has taken him on a journey of self-discovery.

Holtze came across that projector sitting next to 30 reels of 8-mm film in his parents' basement in Aurora, Ont. He took them back to his home in west-end Toronto, hoping to use some of it at a memorial service for his grandmother who passed away that month.

He expected to spool through images of family and not much else.

"What I didn't expect to find is the vast number of various Canadian locations," said Holtze. "I thought I'd see rural Richmond Hill where my grandfather grew up — not Toronto, Vancouver, Banff, Halifax, P.E.I. and Montreal."

Some of the home footage includes popular Nova Scotia tourist sites like Peggys Cove. (Mark Holtze/YouTube)

Holtze, 36, decided to digitize the silent home footage, add music and sound effects and share it on social media sites YouTube, Facebook and Reddit. The response he's received mirrors his own enthusiasm for the discovery.

"It's been a kind of wonderful, multi-level journey," he said.

Home movies are 'an epiphany'

Some of the video was shot by his great-grandfather in the summer of 1965 when he, Holtze's great-grandmother and two others drove from Toronto to Prince Edward Island. They stopped in Nova Scotia along the way.

Holtze isn't sure how he captured other Canadian locations because his great-grandfather didn't have a driver's licence. He figures his job at CN Rail provided him the chance to travel.

The movies are a glimpse into the life of a man who died when Holtze was two years old.

"As I'm digging through these reels, I'm discovering who he was," said Holtze, who works in film and television.

"It's been kind of an epiphany for me in terms of like, a lot of things fell into place as to my artistic side and what I love to do."

'It's nostalgia, it's surreal'

Taking the 8-mm camera while traversing the country was a habit passed on to Holtze's grandfather. He travelled to Halifax and along the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton in 1971.

As Holtze devoured each reel at his home in west-end Toronto, he says his love for the 8-mm medium grew. He admits there's a visceral quality to it that can't be replicated through an Instagram filter.

"It's nostalgia, it's surreal," he said. "It looks like a memory. If you were to take a memory that you had it in your head and splashed it onto against the wall."