Sextortion emails are, unfortunately, nothing new but their proliferation has most definitely increased over the years, with many of us personally knowing someone who has felt that lurch of panic upon receiving one. When director Eugene Kolb found himself confronted with the scam, he was intrigued by the questions that it prompted and felt compelled to speak to others to find out what they had experienced and so his latest film ur heinous habit was born. With 12 searingly open, honest and expressive friends offering up their own stories of shame, masturbation and the internet, Kolb combined androgynous 2D characters and anonymous first person confessions with some lightly sexualised hands and a quirky, beating soundtrack to bring together his highly entertaining animated documentary short. We invited Kolb to speak to us about the challenge presented by paring down hours of Zoom conversations into 12 minutes of sound bites, the staggering honesty he found as people opened up about their own stories and the joy he found experimenting with hands that don’t look too explicit yet are invitingly suggestive.
Can I ask if this film came from a personal experience?
The concept came about after I received the initial scam email, in which scammers claimed to possess hacked webcam footage of me masturbating and threatened to release it to all my contacts unless I paid them off. I found the wording of the email to be odd and funny, which intrigued me right away. Then I read up on the scam and went through dozens of Reddit threads devoted to cataloguing thousands of emails similar to the one I received, and I found that they all shared a common theme of trying to exploit their victims’ sense of shame in order to get a payday. I found this interplay between shame, masturbation, and modern technology to be fascinating and decided to put out a story on Instagram asking if any of my friends wanted to have a frank discussion about these things. And lucky for me, a dozen people were up for it.
There is a distinctive similarity across your work in the use of collage effects and mixed media. How have you developed your style and form as a filmmaker over your career to date?
I find working in mixed media to be a lot more fun than straightforward 2D animation. You get to experiment and play, and it takes some of the pressure off from needing to make everything perfect. I relied more on stock imagery on ur heinous habit than I have in my previous films – partially out of a desire to cut down on post-production by avoiding the need to draw every background element (AKA I’m a little lazy), but more so because there’s so much inventive and accidentally funny stock imagery out there that is just too irresistible to pull from.
Everyone I interviewed was so open, willing, and frankly excited to share their anecdotes and insights on something as private as their sense of shame around masturbation.
Were you surprised by the willingness of people to speak about their own experiences and were there any exceptional revelations in their stories?
I recorded the interviews over Zoom and the phone with the intent of creating some sort of animated avatars for each of the interviewees down the line. The interviews were done sporadically over a couple of months. The film is what it is because of the brilliance of these twelve friends, who were so open, honest, and vulnerable throughout our conversations. I was genuinely surprised by the positive response! Everyone I interviewed was so open, willing, and frankly excited to share their anecdotes and insights on something as private as their sense of shame around masturbation. And all the stories were brilliant – insightful, deeply personal, and at times belly-achingly funny. I was struck by the diversity of the responses I got to virtually every question I posed. It taught me a lot and made for a fun challenge to weave the different responses together into a cohesive narrative.
At what point did you know you had the right balance of stories and what guided the narrative arc we go through?
The most time-consuming portion of making the film was editing the audio interviews. I had around ten or eleven hours of interview material that I ended up cutting down to the twelve minutes of sound bites that you hear in the final film. I made countless timelines of selects and super-selects, organized by topic and theme. And then I just shuffled around the various sections to see what provided the most natural-feeling narrative arc. It was sort of freeing to be able to focus solely on crafting the story from audio interviews with no concern about the visuals. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my partner, Clara, who gave me feedback on dozens of versions of the cut and helped me figure out how to structure the film.
What guidance and references did you give Molly McIntyre to work on the animations, had she heard the interviews beforehand?
I asked Molly to create the character and background illustrations for the film, partially because she didn’t personally know any of the people I interviewed, but more so because she’s a brilliant artist and storyteller who I love working with. I shared the audio cut of the film with Molly and asked her to picture all the characters in various positions they might take up in front of a webcam. My other request was to illustrate the characters as gender-neutral as much as possible. Within a couple of days, Molly delivered dozens of super fun and expressive character options that perfectly matched the mood of the film, along with dozens of the brilliantly illustrated background elements that you see peppered through the film. Molly’s an absolute dream to work with!
I love the lips and their role in the film, were they immediately a part of the animation and can you talk about how you played with them?
Molly’s characters all had varied mouth shapes that I was planning to animate individually. Then I came across some fun and expressive claymation stock lips in Adobe Character Animator that I tempted in for the characters as a placeholder and found that they worked well across the board and made me laugh, so I created a single set of visemes with the collage/magazine texture that you see in the film.
I was very intentional about not showing anything overly graphic in the film as it relates to sex and masturbation, but I couldn’t resist having a bit of fun with it.
The hands, especially the collages of masturbating hands, are so brilliant were these as joyous to create as they are to watch?
The hand animations were a joy to make. It was pure experimentation and play. My initial plan for the short was to puppet the hands of the people I interviewed and make the hands talk as if they embodied the interviewees. It sounded cool but didn’t work in practice, so I used some of the hand photos I got from the film’s participants in the interstitials, to give a little bit of breathing room to the film between the various talking sections. I was very intentional about not showing anything overly graphic in the film as it relates to sex and masturbation, but I couldn’t resist having a bit of fun with it.
When did you get Composer Jacob Tardien involved in the process and what did you want the music to add, as given the amount of interviewee audio you could have also made it work without a score?
One of the last complicated bits was figuring out how to layer music throughout a short film that was full of non-stop talking, but Jacob Tardien, the brilliant talent that he is, was more than up to the task, creating these intentionally repetitive and incredible melodies to accent the entire film. I love working with Jacob. He’s crazy talented and funny and just a joy to collaborate with.
It was a tough ask: add music to a short with virtually non-stop talking, and make the music fun and rhythmic (in a way that masturbation could be), but not overpowering.
He got involved pretty early on when I had my first real cut of the audio interviews. It was a tough ask: add music to a short with virtually non-stop talking, and make the music fun and rhythmic (in a way that masturbation could be), but not overpowering so that it takes away from what is being said. Jacob came up with tons of fantastic options, and we just kept layering and trying different things until it felt like all the sections complemented one another. Jacob’s brilliant score elevates the film; it helps build tension, makes the film funnier and so much more of a joy to watch.
What has this film inspired you to create next?
I LOVED making ur heinous habit, but like many of my past animated projects, it took quite a long time to complete. I’m slowly shifting towards making more live-action narrative and documentary films to speed up some of that process and get more personal work out. We’re currently in post-production on a live-action narrative short I wrote and directed earlier this year with a great team of people. Very excited to put that out into the world along with a couple of other short and long-form projects I have in various stages of development.
