In the four-minute clip, titled You'll never get anywhere if you can't take a joke, love, a ‘female’ thumb tells a ‘male’ thumb that she’s thinking of making a film.

“There isn’t an audience for female films”, the man thumb promptly replies – unless she counts “your mum, your nan [and] your ex-boyfriends who are basically trying to ascertain if they were correct in dumping you”. If she really wants to make a movie, he informs her, it’ll have to be a rom-com. “With lots of kissing in it. Cos girls love kissing.”

Much of Tunnard’s script mocks the sexist attitudes of people working within the film industry. The man thumb can’t bring himself to say the words “Bechdel test”, and muses that “there’s just so much more to consider when you’ve got female crew. Like all the time you’ll lose because women are always stopping the take going, ‘Cut, cut! I need the loo! Who wants to come with me?’”

But she also skewers the limitations of the stock female characters found in Hollywood movies. “Basically, you need to decide if you’re cute-sexy or ballsy-sexy,” says the man thumb sagely. “Are you gonna be self-aware and make jokes about the fact that you can’t get a man? Or are you gonna pretend that you’re too whimsical to notice that you don’t need one?”

“You’ll have to make a rom-com”: These talking thumbs perfectly sum up life as a female filmmaker