Coming Clean

When dim-witted husband Dennis finds his marital bliss unravelled by the discovery of a single hair, he plots an even hairier revenge.

Coming Clean was my first, serious attempt at making a short film. My previous short, The Falling was made in one day on a mobile phone. I was ready to step up. Just not too far — I was terrified at the idea of pulling a film crew together and actors were still an alien species to me. So I decided my next film would be an animation. None of the pressure of being on a set. I could work at my own pace. And I wouldn’t be reliant on anyone else to let me make it.

A few years earlier, my brother Benn and his fiancée Merrin had asked me to design their wedding invitation. The idea I came up with was the image of a bar of soap topped with two different-coloured pubic hairs forming a love heart. Romantic, no? Well, strangely, Benn and Merrin didn’t think so. To their credit though, they did use it for the thank you card after the wedding.

The idea stuck with me. It was both disgusting and funny. Right up my alley. So when I was trying to come up with an idea for a simple animation, this felt perfect. I won’t go into the research I had to do to recreate the look of pubic hairs. I’m still trying to forget all that.

Anyway, I got the film made. Eventually. As I learned, animation is extremely time-consuming. The project took me two years to complete, but in the end, it was worth it. Coming Clean went on to play at a few international film festivals, but its biggest success was being screened on a Japanese television network. That still makes me laugh.