Introduction

The Muffin is a collaborative and open project where artists meet and create stunning animation shorts together.

Everyone is invited to contribute to the project and everyone is allowed to watch, enjoy and spread the final animations.

The result will be a number of funny 3D animation shorts based on the same characters, each with a likewise story released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

If you like the idea of helping the muffin project, read on at “how to contribute”.

Will it work out?

Some of you may be sceptical about the success of such a project, which is a valid concern. Let me explain my point of view:

Before 2001 barely someone would have believed, that a bunch of volunteers could write an encyclopedia as comprehensive as the encyclopedia britannica. Today Wikipedia is one of the most important sources of knowledge to us and this is not the only example of successful online collaborations.
I believe that this kind of collaboration will work for 3D animation as well.

With no budget (and sometimes even with), there is always the risk of a never ending production state. In order to minimize the risk further, here are the ideas:

• make collaboration as easy as possible.
  First of all, by splitting all the work up in tiny parts, that can be done rather quickly in no time. For example writing an idea for one episode’s story can be done in a minute without any knowledge of animation itself. or modelling a background property like a bottle shouldn’t take too long.
  The list of tasks will be published and updated all the time, so you can choose what you want to do at any time.

• one full-time team member
  As the initiator of the project, I will be working (almost) full-time on this project for up to one year. After that I’will continue in spare time of course.

• scalability
  At this point, I don’t know if there will be hundreds of supporters or if it’s going to be me alone. This is why the muffin goal are episodes. Worst case: Only one guy doing just one minimalistic episode alone. Best case: A big bunch of interested people concentrate their skills and create multiple stunning episodes of high quality. Let’s hope for the latter.

That way, I’m very certain that we will have a good result at the end. Please read on “how to contribute”.