Hi, my name is Rob Summons and I'm the writer and the director of the short film Skuif. The theme is about the kind of love conquering reason and the crazy things we do for love and I guess how beautiful that is. I chose this subject because my mum went through an experience of having brain cancer and died very quickly afterwards which was obviously pretty horrible. But this film kind of birthed out of it because I began to imagine what life would be like with onset of dementia. My mum and dad had an experience on the road where my mum started to lose her mind out there and it made me think about how often that would happen for older couples and dealing with dementia in really tough situations. That kind of inspired the film. When you're making a short film, the most challenging thing is the money. So getting together the money, I had to self-finance, which was quite difficult, but we got there got there and yeah I think for most of us short filmmakers that's always the most troubling bit, how am I going to pay for the thing. I had a great cast in this film and the leads were Chris Hayward and Karen Fairfax and I think they both did a terrific job. Chris in particular did a remarkable job being the lead of the film and just expressing so much of what was going on without really me needing to direct him so it was an absolute pleasure to have him in the film. If I could start the project all over again and do it again, which I wouldn't choose to do, I'd prefer to work on something else, I would probably engage a bit more of a disciplined shooting style. I mean, the film was very stripped back, but I'd probably use less cutting and film in long uninterrupted kind of more documentary style takes But we kind of didn't have time or money to be able to you know deal with such Indulgences and as it was only my second film we decided to keep it a bit more simple than that I guess the most rewarding experience of working on the film was the relation to my mum and what she'd been through. She died only probably about six or seven months earlier. So to make a film that was inspired by what happened with her and her character was really rewarding and really nice as well after making the film to be able to show it to friends and family and get a reaction from them. I started enjoying films when I was about probably probably around 20 or so, and I was doing an arts degree and I found that my writing style was very visual, so I started kind of pursuing the screen side of things more, and I just loved writing for screen and then I thought I might direct a little thing and now I kind of love it all so yeah in terms of whether short film should be viewed as a stepping stone I think everyone's different my intention is definitely to make features eventually but I got to say making shorts, well I mean I've written a lot of features and writing shorts is so much easier and having such a tighter more enclosed world is really lovely and you can do some really interesting things. So I love short films, I think they can be incredibly powerful and I think it's remarkable that people can create such powerful things with only 10, 15, 20 minutes. Since this project, I've made another short, and I probably will make another short soon, but the project I'm most excited about is a feature I've been writing, and it's about a young woman who falls pregnant in a climate change cult that doesn't allow pregnancies. I think it's going to be a super exciting project to watch and to work on so yeah I'm really pumped about that and it's called Change. Hit me up if you're interested for any more details.