my grandmother always liked european cinema, so when we went over to her house, her and my uncle would pull out some italian classic or french classic that we'd all roll our eyes at and then be amazed by how good it was!

that allowed me to give the films that my wife was recommending to me a chance, then i got really into them - before she met me, she was going to the cinema twice a week. she bought me my first camera after we spoke about films.

i just love watching early camera effects, early animations, from the lumierre brothers sort of stuff, right up to the matrix — when people have done a novel camera effect which is a real thing, not just making a computer do it for you.

then there's polish drama from the 80s, like k i es l o w s k i and zanussi. kurosawa too, though he's not polish obviously, but these films where just the story is completely everything. filmed on crummy locations on a minimal budget with one camera and no special effects at all. everyone talks about being a zero budget filmmaker but those guys budgets were ridiculously small.

i should mention godzilla as well. its awesome. they did 2 versions, the japanese version and the american version. the japanese version was the original, then they recut it for an american audience. basically using the special effects but putting a really junk story over the top. when you watch it in japanese it's an amazingly well-acted film — the tension/the build up is crazy. it's so good that the deficiencies, that are laughed about don't matter because it's in the same context.

the first time i filmed anything of any significance was making a film about my mates stag do. i tried to do it like a proper movie. it went down very well and got thousands of hits on youtube. it's down now because the guy said "look, i can't have another thousand people watching me vomit". some guys on the stag do who were filmmakers then asked me to do camera work on a couple of shoots, i started thinking, yeah this is really fun, got a super 8 camera, then made some really bad films.

the thing is, failure is the important thing with straight 8. the best films are great things to watch, great fun, but actually they are so good because it's so easy to fail. unless you've crashed and burned you don't really have an impression of what a cool competition it is.

there's no point trying to save yourself, no point in going 'well it's straight 8, i'll try and do something really easy.' the glory of films that have worked when people have really gone overboard on their effort is great, but the glory of films that have not worked when people have gone overboard on their effort is almost better — those glorious failures.

there were 2 things behind the last trip — i'd had a go at a couple of other straight 8 entries the year before, without really understanding the relationship the audience will have with an image, as opposed to someone who's just filmed it. i needed to get a good story and i also wanted to push the boundaries of the medium, because my favourite films in straight 8 have all been the ones that have done something crazy.

the story was, that there were a couple of guys in cardiff that i'd known since i was a child and they'd passed away. there was always a, 'what they would have wanted to do' type of thing, and actually in the vague annals there was some guy in cardiff whose son had become a massive multi-billionaire in silicon valley and had planned to send his father's ashes into space. so there's a tiny element of truth there, i don't know if it actually happened but it was definitely talked about.

then the actor keith's best friend had died a year or two before we made the film — so there were things very close to him in it. that was something that had really happened, not that long ago. so there was inspiration from the real life that was going on at the time.

medicine is quite a hardcore environment to work in — a lot of doctors are excellent doctors, and good on them for just doing medicine and not really wanting to other things outside of that, but i find that a bit insular. it's a challenge to keep things going with family and medicine and try to pursue my other career — making film.