The Story / Screenplay

As with the whole project, the story and screenplay was also developed by the whole community. It is about Joe, a young boy who is a penniless, but pleasant blunderer (more about the characters here).

In the first episode’s story Joe applies for a job as pizza delivery boy. But before he can start to earn money, he has to pass a special test. Will he pass? Read on!

Screenplay

And here’s the screenplay for the episode:

If you have suggestions to improve it, jump right into the corresponding forum thread.

Guidelines/Suggestions for story/screenplay development

If you’re planning on writing a story for a possible following episode: That’s just great! Let your imagination run free and let us know your idea.

Please also read the following guideline here and mind the rules.

Political correctness

Zero tolerance for discrimination of minorities. If you create content that does discriminate, it will not get accepted.

Language

I think it would be the best, if the story doesn’t need a language at all. Non-verbal stories live through good animation/acting and are understood by everyone in independence to their native language.

However, if the story needs some kind of language (spoken or written), English is the language of choice. The reason is it’s wide international spread and acceptance. In case, I would love to have some translations/synchronizations to other languages as well.

References to contemporary culture

We all live in a world where good and bad things happen. There is love, tolerance, sympathy, collaboration and friendship, but there is also envy, abuse, hate and even murder and war. Feel free to build your story around any topic, feeling or grievance that concerns you by making it the subject of discussion. There are many ways to deal with a topic. You may want to make a statement by driving things absurd, exaggerate or even provoke.

Feelings and a deeper meaning are the spice in a drama. You may want to develop a simple slapstick animation, but to bring it to a point: a thoughtful story that has a statement is very welcome.

On the other hand, politically motivated stories are not welcome. The goal of this project is NOT to make positive or negative advertisement for a political party, person or ideal.

Duration

I guess everyone would love to make a full feature film here, but our time and resources are limited. Keep that in mind when developing an episode.

It’s hard to give an exact time limit for the animation, because it depends, for example, on how many locations or characters there will be. I would say a valid  duration goal is between one and three minutes.

Story concept origin

The idea of The Muffin project was to involve the community from the beginning on. In the first phase we collected story ideas and elected the best one in the forums. You can see all other stories contributions at the voting poll in the forum. I’d like to thank all contributors here.