Help Tim Burton Write A 'Stainboy' Story Via Twitter

"Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor."

That's the opening to Tim Burton's Twitter-based exquisite corpse experiment, which is weaving a story for his nervous watercolor superhero Stainboy, 140 characters at a time. What better technique for Tim Burton than the exquisite corpse, which is a sequential collaborative storytelling method, in which each person builds on the last material submitted. (In the classic surrealist-invented version of the method, unlike this version, participants can't read everything that has gone before.) Find out what's going to happen to Stainboy and the goo, after the break.

Stainboy first appeared in the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, then starred in a short set of flash animations in the year 200o. Now he's getting a new story written in part by anyone who wants to contribute. BurtonStory is soliciting tweets from willing participants, with the 'best' tweets selected to add to the story between now and December 6. Twelve have been selected so far.

(And, actually, since a #Burtonstory hashtag is required for tweets to be counted towards the story, you've only got 127 characters per missive.)

You can see all submitted tweets and read the story as it stands now on BurtonStory, which also offers the rules/guidelines:

  • Tweet as often as you like
  • The best Tweets of the day will be selected to build the story
  • All selected Tweets can be viewed under "All Submissions"
  • Follow the story as it unfolds on the "Read the Story" tab
  • Inappropriate submissions will be blocked
  • Not so many rules, really. It's an interesting experiment. Question is, will the story become anything after it is written, or is this just a fun stand-alone project?

    [Badass Digest]