Broken Toy
Thrown out, far from home and vulnerable, a self-aware child's toy begins a perilous journey across a hostile adult world - bringing home a terrible secret.
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Daniel Mark MillerWriter
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Project Type:Screenplay, Short Script
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Genres:Sci-Fi
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Number of Pages:5
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Country of Origin:United Kingdom
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Language:English
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First-time Screenwriter:No
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Student Project:No
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Rome Independent Prisma AwardsRome, Italy
December 9, 2019
Semi Finalist -
SF Indiefest 22nd editionSan Francisco
February 1, 2020
Finalist - Best Short Screenplay -
New Renaissance Film Festival 2020London
September 15, 2020
Best Short Screenplay
Daniel Mark Miller is British-Iranian VFX
artist, screenwriter and filmmaker. Daniel
began writing at a young age and has always
had a love of the strange, the fantastical and
the underdog.
Daniel has continued writing and independent
work while working for over 10 years as a
professional Digital Compositor on major
feature films and TV shows such as Baby Driver, The Crown, Good
Omens, Pinocchio, Giri Haji and Morbius.
He has recently one Best Short Screenplay with the script for
“Broken Toy” at the New Renaissance Film Festival 2020
Broken Toy is a live-action science fiction drama
with a twist in the vein of Black Mirror, Twilight
Zone or the Sixth Sense. Inspired by seeing the
vulnerability of my own child when very small and
the sudden parental awareness of the dangers of
the world at large I took the common motif of a
broken toy as a metaphor for a hurt or suffering
child – something experienced by a number of
people close to me - and applied it to a
contemporary, science fiction scenario. This became
the award-winning script from which I want to make
this film.
Mikkei is a children’s toy, a robot companion and
is in many ways a child himself. When cast away,
he has to get home, inspired by his innate sense
of loyalty and love, yet hampered by his small
size, the vast distance and the hostility of the
World around him. I have always rooted for the
underdog, and Mikkei is very much the ultimate
underdog: small, gentle, innocent and damaged he
will have to confront something far beyond his
understanding.
Ultimately this is an empowering story, with some
dark moments, but not “edgy”. It is a story of
innocence lost but virtue and courage retained. It
is the story of a small toy, broken but not
defeated.