Muffin MacGuffin says that younger kids younger were way ahead of him when he first started creating stuff for the web. Muffin, writer of Mouthwash and a lot more online content, is currently a senior at Tufts University. So what does that make him? 20? 21? 22, if he's a dunce which he sure isn't. Yet he refers to younger siblings who get the web "in a way that people my age don't get." I like that. A lot. Because it puts Muffin and me on equal footing. As does the title he gave this interview.
I mentioned Mr MacGuffin once before in this space when I was first alerted to Mouthwash by my niece, the Tufts student. She loved Mouthwash and I immediately saw why. It's very funny; a pretty impressive piece of work -- more so when you realize that it's being turned out by university students.
Thanks to a little online stalking action, I discovered that Mouthwash isn't even Muffin's first web series. He wrote Six Months along with Miles Donovan. And there are a bunch of other videos by MacGuffin on the Six Month's YouTube channel (many featuring Miles and Muffin). Rounding out his online oeuvre are his blog, his other blog, the very weird Fictionalized Memoir site and Twitter feed Oh yeah, he's also writing a movie called Morgan Taylor's Suicide.
I wanted to know a little more about Muffin MacGuffin so I shot him over a bunch of questions. Here's the first half of our interview. Part Two is here.
Q.
You are a university student I believe, but also very prolific when it comes to creating web content. You’ve been writing Mouthwash, a web series for Tufts TV, and I also noticed that you have a YouTube channel called Six Months and I believe that you are working on a film. How are your grades? What are you studying? What year are you in? How does the university feel about what you’re doing?
A.
a. My grades are cool. I don’t have a very active social life.
b. I’m a women’s studies major and a film studies minor, and I’m writing scripts for my senior theses for both, which I hope is okay by my school because I am really getting into them right now.
Q.
Women's studies? Seriously?
A.
Yeah. I took a women's studies course freshman year and it changed the way I was thinking. I definitely was not a misogynist or anything, but it shifted my thinking into a completely different paradigm that colored (you might say: coloured) the way I was learning in all my other classes. What else could I ask of a major, you know? I'm carrying this with me into my writing. Honestly, I think plenty of screenwriters could stand to take a few women's studies courses.
Q.
How did Mouthwash come about?
A.
Mouthwash wasn't my idea, actually. I was at a meeting of TUTV (Tufts University Television), and Eric Nichols pitched the series. I passed him a note, like in middle school, asking "Could I write your show?" And that's how it started. With me, anyway. Eric had created the characters and I think had an idea of the direction he wanted to take the show. It was up to me to help bring his vision to the page, and also create work that was personal for me and I could be proud of.
Q.
How long have you been creating stuff for the web? Did you do it before getting to Tufts? Will the movie you’re currently working on be released on the web? Will there be more Mouthwash after the film is finished?
A.
a. I’ve been creating stuff that makes its way online for a few years now, but I’ve only been making web-specific content for the past couple years. In high school, my friends and I all had siblings two years younger than we, and they were up on web content long before I ever was. I think it was just ingrained in them in a way that people my age don’t get. I had to work on it. Originally, I produced an eighteen minute show that I had to splice up into pieces to put onto youtube. Who wants to watch that? You know?
b. I actually don’t know what the plan is for this movie. At this point, it’s kind of a monumental undertaking; we’re just trying to get it all shot and edited before we can really plan on any distribution method. We’re going to be making some web-only content about the movie, though. More on that soon?
c. I think that we’re considering Mouthwash put to bed right now. We shot a little more material that could be considered canonical, and maybe we’ll release it some day, but for now I wouldn’t expect us to reunite the cast and also get Robert Deniro for a Christmas special. Okay, that would actually be awesome.
Q.
Talk about the process from concept to the web. Do you write outlines for the episodes? How many script drafts? Who else reads the scripts? Is there any approval process, anyone giving notes? What’s the shooting schedule like -- how long do you shoot/episode? How long does the edit take and are you involved in that process? How many people are on the crew? Is your team entirely made up of students?
A.
a. We had a few arc ideas for the season (I’m referring here to the second season; the first one was pretty slapdash) that we toyed with, and then I went ahead and started scripting. I was also informed that one of the actors would have access to a house on Cape Cod with a boat, so I should write an episode that included these things (the boat never materialized, and I hear everyone had a great time shooting out there). I started writing the episodes in chronological order one at a time, and then I’d shoot them to the directors, who would circulate them among actors. The actors would give the directors notes, the directors would decide what to change, and send me those details, and then I’d rewrite. In general, I didn’t do more than two drafts per episode, but a couple of times we’d end up scrapping an entire storyline (Jess almost ran for class president) and I’d have to combine episodes or rewrite bits or so on. I was done with writing the whole season by about the end of October, which meant I could get started on the movie.
b. We shot a bunch of bits at once, so I don’t know that I could figure out how long an individual episode would take. Depending on how far ahead of shooting we were scripted, we would shoot all the scenes that took place in a single location in the same afternoon. The actors would just mostly change shirts between episodes. I’m sure diligent viewers notice that hair lengths don’t make sense at all, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
c. I’m not involved in editing, but it usually takes a couple of days at most. We did so much of it while we were also shooting, we mostly had things edited while we were shooting the episode after next.
d. Our crew usually had about a half-dozen people at most. One person would operate camera (this was often also Eric, who was directing), one person would be boom operator (this was sometimes me), and someone to help Eric set up lights (this was often Eric, too). So it could be as few as three people, and we were all students. Our school’s TV station, TUTV, did a great job of training people, and we would often let our show be practice for students who wanted to someday shoot their own.
Q.
How many people have been watching Mouthwash? Do you get an audience outside the university community? You must see members of your audience on campus every day, do they offer up story and character ideas and how do you respond? Has viewer response effected your process in anyway?
A.
a. According to youtube, we have almost a thousand viewers, though it varies pretty wildly from one episode to the next, I don’t know how many people are actually watching the whole thing. I haven’t heard of people outside of the university community watching it other than my parents, and they came to it pretty late. I think to some degree the show appeals directly to students in a way that it might not to people outside of the school. I’d like to say we captured the zeitgeist, but I’m not sure how to spell it.
b. I have occasionally gotten feedback from people around campus, and it’s largely positive. I don’t make a lot of appearances around school or on the show, so I don’t get many chances to interact with our viewers. I didn’t get a lot of ideas from audience members, which is a shame, but we didn’t have a very long production schedule. If we were running the show for longer, I’d love to include people’s stories on it. The college hook-up culture has created some really funny situations. I used a few of my own for the characters.
c. We got some negative comments on youtube which affected my creative process in the sense of writing the show required a lot more ice cream. You can see this in the show actually. Whenever a character mentions ice cream, it is because I was drowning my sorrows with some chocolate chip cookie dough.
Read part two of our interview.
