Okay, so in your example you could have said something like, “, but instead of waves I would maybe say drowning”…right? And then the co-D’s could make a determination on keeping the original vs another suggestion? I think that’s easy enough, I suppose.
I think that once voting’s over and we shift more into review/patching mode, suggesting minor riff and skit alterations (or additions) will become the major focus of the group.
I’m guessing most of the revision suggestions will probably be done in this thread itself, with the co-directors being the only ones who can directly edit the locked view-only version of the draft scrip, but people in her can chime in with their revision suggestions like:
in 4a at 58:48, what if instead of “Yeah, well… I ate your Chobani at lunch!” we say “Yeah, well… I ate your frogurt!”?
Then the rest of the group can weigh in on which line seems funnier, and the all wise and knowing co-directors can determine whether they feel it’s worth changing.
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We can reopen the discussion of voting method later if we want, but right now it’s looking like we want to have 4 voting options (G) (S) (B) (X), with a slight preference for public voting (which is way easier to do).
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Suppose I’ll go ahead with my submissions.
50:48-50:55
[Kevin’s tom] The bombing of el Segundo
16:27-16:32
[Hampton’s crow] Here, take my Juul
I’ve been pretty close with the operations of this project, so I’ll continue to support the spreadsheet and let three other people take the co-director positions.
For voting, DeepHurting brought up a suggestion to make the riffs anonymous and condense them into as few columns as possible. This means we either use the honour system and don’t vote on our own riffs, or we allow voting on our own riffs. I prefer the latter, but could go either way. I certainly didn’t produce all gold – some of mine I’d give no medal, but I was just trying to fill space. Even if someone does vote all their own riffs gold, I think it’ll work itself out.
For the voting, I’d like to keep it simple, with two options: Emoji medals (
and 
for no medal), or text (“gold” or “(G)”, etc.) To be clear, a “no medal” vote is not the same as not voting.
I’ll write some brief instructions in the riffing channel when we shift into voting at the end of Saturday. The Google sheet will change to read-only (plus comments). If anyone has anything to say about the process, now is the time!
I also favor the no voting for yourself rule, but we should try to be consistent whichever way we go. (I know what sounds amusing in my own head, but it only becomes a proper joke if somebody else laughs at it. Otherwise I’m just listening to the funny talking dog voices like David Berkowitz.)
Anonymous semi-random read-order of riffs does have the benefit of being easier to fit on one page, making it harder to play favorites (or feel like you’re overly-favoring one riffer over another), and each joke can stand on it’s own merits without the poor sod in column 20 always forced to go last, but it does make preventing self-voting harder to enforce, and some running gags or multi-part jokes that weren’t merged together into one large cell may be harder to follow once everything’s jammed up together like Tetris blocks.
If you did want to try to merge everything together anonymously, I suppose you could put the merged voting up on a brand new first tab and then hide the original 8 (if it’s possible to prevent others from unhiding it) so that nobody can see them until after voting is over, and then leave it up to the co-directors to look through and see who left votes for what, and call out anybody who appears to be stuffing their own ballot boxes.
It’s done. I was not able to limit comments like I thought I could, but I did manage to compress each sheet to 4-8 columns pretty easily. I don’t see a problem (except it’ll be hard to detect self-voting, but I still don’t see that as a problem), but I’m going into new territory here with the comment voting.
Anyhow, we should look at selecting the co-directors soon. How about setting a deadline for submissions? Or reminding people about it (I forget).
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We should get the directors selected. @DeepHurting, @griff17matt and @EBK already have their best riffs selected. @Ansible and @abskani, what do you think your best riffs are?
Does anyone else want to volunteer to help assemble the final script?
I have to be completely honest with you. I’ve written no riffs. I haven’t even watched the movie. I know it was my idea to begin with, but at that time, I had some extra time in my life. That disappeared for a couple of reasons:
- Work picked up for me, and
- A previous “passion project” of mine, which was on hold for a while and that I’d been working on for over two years, finally ramped up and is nearing completion (at least of phase 1)
So, while the idea for the program is still there, and I’ve STARTED on the project, I’m afraid I have to shelve this project for the time being. But rest assured, that anything that I start I DO finish, though it may not be in a timely manner (as the two year “progress” on my other project can attest to.
So, I’m afraid my hands are tied for a moment due to previous obligations. Trust me when I say though, that when I’m ready, I’ll be devoted to the project. My best friend in college one time said that I was like a bulldog - once I sank my teeth into something, I do. not. let. go. EVER
While that may be cold comfort for now, it will come, when I have time. I wish I had better news to give you, I truly do. :’(
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Thanks for getting the ball rolling, Ansible. Don’t even worry about it. I assumed you became busy, and have been @ing you mostly as a courtesy (but I’ll stop pinging you from now). The forum will be here when you have the time.
I completely understand about trying to keep multiple projects in the air and having to prioritize.
While I look forward to eventually seeing uRiff in action, we can totally make this work old-school. Once we settle on a script, I am willing to take what we’ve got and manually cut and paste it into Adobe Premiere at the appropriate timecodes.
Doing it by hand will certainly take longer, but it also means I can fine tune riff placement/duration on the screen and color code/center them by speaker, which I think will make the experience slightly more dynamic and easier to read.
I can even get a bit fancy if the situation calls for it, like momentarily increasing font scale if somebody violently shouts something at the screen or shifting caption positions into something a bit more chaotic during “rhubarb” bits where everybody’s deliberately talking over everybody else.
https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard11/uploads/mst3k/original/2X/a/a64a522386a83af579fa60dfee358073e3dd8a2e.jpeg
https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard11/uploads/mst3k/original/2X/3/313a80f80e086e3588386de83cceb0f54bb961a6.jpeg
https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard11/uploads/mst3k/original/2X/7/79df21502d4f996a6e7654beaf96db104dc8f001.jpeg
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We’ve had a private discussion, and because of the low number of people interested in being co-directors, we are going to make all four nominees directors, and I can step in as a fifth if a tie-breaker is needed. So that’s @EBK , @DeepHurting , @abskani , and @griff17matt .
I’ll be working on organizing the riffs. Hopefully they can start on section 1a on or shortly after Monday.
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Howdy y’all, how’s it going? There are four directors? What’s next?
Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
I lost track of this. I haven’t heard anything from the board of directors, but I’d love a quick update.
I think everybody just kind of wandered off or got distracted by squirrels outside the window.
(Myself included, because I’ve got about 5 different irons in 5 different fires at the moment, and was just handed a 6th.) I just checked the spreadsheet and nobody else has touched it since I left my last batch of comments on October 13th. I made it through the first 1/3 of the script, but I don’t think we ever had more than three people do any reviewing, and mainly just on tab 1a.
If it’s more or less dead in the water with the other directors, I’ll take my best stab at releasing a version based on the comments that were left so far and my best judgement on the rest, just so we have something to show for it.
From what we did accomplish production review-wise of the first two tabs, I’d say about 75% of the highest ranked jokes were no issue, but that remaining 25% is a mix of lines that need to be cut, trimmed or tweaked due to length, stepping on other jokes or setup lines, being too similar to other gags earlier/later in the script, or other logistical issues, and a small handful that more than one reviewer just didn’t like or felt missed the mark for one reason or another.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I’ve got to prioritize right now (including creating a sculpture for a funeral) but I’d say that if nobody else weighs in within the next two weeks, I’ll just grab what we have so far and run with it so we can move onto something new and it’s not a totally wasted effort.
I had hoped we’d have this whole thing wrapped up and ready to show before Thanksgiving. But if I can start laying down subtitles to time codes by the middle of December, I can probably release a caption (and possibly limited animation) version in time for Christmas, and then we can see if there’s any interest in continuing on from there.
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Feel free to ask me to weigh in if there are multiple, close options. I’m around - I just wanted to step away to give other people a chance. If, after deciding on the script, you don’t have time to produce the video, I can go ahead with my original subtitle file plan. It’s simplistic, but it’s something.
I think it’s safe to say we wont be getting 4 sets of production eyes on it, so if you’ve got the time, feel free to wade in and bring it up to at least 2 or 3.
By the way, here’s where I left off on recycling the lumakey from the end credits of MST3K: The Movie in an attempt to create small silhouette loops that I can place throughout our fan-riff.
First of all, I managed to play around with the Alpha settings on this short 3 minute sequence enough that I could create a pure black and white version which also included the fade-in/fade-out while they’re sitting down and getting up, which I hope I’ll be able to preserve as a visual effect over the top of our own movie without it getting all pixelated or dropping the matte, like it was doing when I was trying to use blue as my key color. This also provided me with a nice clean HD theater seat mask that will be my default 2nd layer over the top of the movie that all my other animation clips can be lined up to, so they should (theoretically) fit seamlessly together, just like how the MIGIZI shorts were filmed.
Other than the theater entrance/exit clip, which I’ll talk about in a minute, my plan is to create three separate vertical strips containing Tom, Host (played here by Mike), and Crow and isolate just their individual seat areas by using masks to mask out everything but their individual movement space.
These can then be further cut up into “talking” and “not talking” “look left” “look right” loops of each character, which I can manually match to the captions at the same time that I’m placing them.
The one downside here (other than that there’s not a lot of “unique” theater interaction to be gained from this sequence beyond Mike briefly raising a finger to point upwards) is that the guys are a lot more animated in their seats than normal, doing a lot of leaning right and left and tilting in to talk to each other, which is going to make getting clean masks separations and animation loops with more or less the same start and end point a lot trickier.
As for the 3 minute sequence I’m pulling footage from, I’ve managed to mask out everything on screen but a tiny little 12 second clip during the sitting down sequence where Mike’s head inconveniently passes over the top of a small section of credits. I suspect I’ll have to export this bit and clean it up frame by frame, and then re-import it back into the sequence. Which isn’t terribly complicated, but it is time consuming and something I don’t have the time to mess about with right now.
In terms of the movie itself, the print that I’m using is a pretty high quality 1920 x 1080, which is the same aspect ratio I want the finished product to be. Most classic MST3K episodes weren’t presented letterbox, and I wanted to leave a little extra black space down at the bottom for captions, so I’ve sort of split the difference between classic and Netflix MST3K and shrunk the movie video 85%, then moved the theater seats up a bit higher and leveled the bottom edge of the movie to the exact line where the edges of the theater seats meet. Hopefully this doesn’t look too weird, but I think it’s the best middle ground between supporting text captions and preserving the film’s original aspect ratio while leaving as much of the movie visible inside the theater as possible, which was always something of an annoyance on the original MST3K where occasionally there’d be some important bit of movie “plot” down at the bottom edge of the frame and you just couldn’t see what was happening past the silhouettes.
Luckily, the theater seats in the MST3K movie were an unusual length, and during this end sequence everybody sat one seat closer to the middle, so even though we’re losing a seat to either side because of the black border, it actually looks more “normal” to me because there’s only one seat to the right of Crow.
I’ve tested the shadowrama overlay on a section of the movie using just the clip where they’re all sitting down, and it looks gorgeous. No rough edges or pixels. Other than not hearing the voices, and the silhouettes being an unusual size, it looks just like a professionally produced episode in DVD quality.
One final thing – Even though this is going to be a lot more work than just adding a simple subtitle file to the existing movie (which it may eventually come to if it turns out I’ve bitten off more than I can chew) the nice thing about doing it this way is that all the captions will be on their own separate layer, so if after the fact, anybody feels like recording the riff dialogue for us, it will be incredibly easy to just turn them off and reexport what I have as a clean version that still has all of the silhouettes in place and synced up to the movie. (So we’d basically be doing a reverse MIGIZI short, where the real actors are our theater substitutes, and the stand-ins are doing the voices!)
Also, if this works out, all the theater elements I’m using here could then be recycled for future fan-riffs using the same technique.
And though the range of silhouette movement is currently pretty basic, if we do want to try something fancy like having Tom Servo float up and be a buoy, Crow raise a hand or freak out, or our host to hold up a sign or some other silhouette sight-gag, we could theoretically shoot our own elements against green screen or even a white sheet using stand-ins, and then I could insert these in as a new animation loop layer. I suspect Tom and the host would be comparatively easy to shoot in this way (I have a full-sized Tom Servo or my plastic Shout Factory model I could use, and my profile and haircut are close enough to Mike’s to pass in silhouette), but Crow might be trickier since his net has to have the exact same level of detail and edge crispness as it does in the source clip, otherwise it’ll look weird and obviously out of place.
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That’s amazing stuff.
DeepHurting is equipped with effective skills: Creativity. Video editing. Comedic sense. Biting off more than he can chew. 
(hopefully not)
Just to make sure you are remembering, Ivan (as in “official forums Ivan”) did suggest we use a generic host so we are not putting words into Mike’s mouth (the bots are less of a concern). If you are cool with the risk, that’s cool with me, but you’re doing all the work so I just wanted to recap that part.
Let’s do a headcount and see who’s around. @EBK , @abskani , @griff17matt , director roll call!
My concerns:
-
Animation seems more like trying to control someone else’s IP. Are we still hoping to hear from Alternaversal on whether this is a problem for them?
-
Editing takes an arbitrary bajillion times longer than recording voices.
I made one botched riff project around 2010 or 2011 that no one gets to see because the rough draft is on the editor’s Youtube account and not mine. We recorded audio of the script for the 15 minute short in less than a month. Then when I said, “I’m gonna edit this sucker myself!” I spent 5 years re-editing it, had my ideal version ready, then got mad at politics in the news and hit the palm rest on my laptop which coincidentally was right over the harddrive and instantly destroyed everything on it. Of course, five voice tracks was ambitious. Foolhardy to take it away from someone who focused in editing, but he seemed to have lost interest after the rough cut that had too many jokes in it. I feel like it shouldn’t take five years for five tracks in 15 minutes. But I learned how to edit and now just never want to do it again but need to get better at directing the professional.
Yeah, on the captions, I’m just going to say “Host” and let people imagine it’s whoever they want it to be. For all anybody knows, it could be Matt Claude VanDamme in the theater.
I think for what we’re doing as a no budget fan project recycling existing theater footage is unlikely to cause any significant concern. If we had somebody trying to impersonate Mike, Joel, or Jonah, it might be another matter.
That said, if somebody feels like shooting some brand new generic theater footage using entirely homemade bots against a green screen, I could always switch to using that instead. I don’t even need the theater seat part, just the upper torsos.
Right now looped existing footage is easier for me to do solo and I know the end results will be at least passable. With footage shot at home, if the lighting is uneven and the edges aren’t as clearly defined as they are in the HD clips I’m pulling from, I can’t guarantee that any silhouettes won’t end up looking more like mirages or fuzzy ghosts when run through the extremely finicky lumakey filters I’m using in Premiere.
I definitely hear that. I’m used to editing my own stuff for YouTube, which often takes about 5 hours or so to piece together 10 minutes of semi-coherent video, and the longest thing I’ve ever done was 20 minutes, so this is definitely going to take a lot longer.
Note that I am not intending to do any sort of complex mouth movement matching here.
I’m just talking about a few extremely simple movement loops that I can slightly speed up, slow down, or reverse direction on to make the silhouettes look a little more lifelike than a flat static image slapped on the bottom of the screen. Thankfully Crow’s the only one who’s mouth you can clearly see open and close most of the time, so hopefully for most lines it’ll just be the same generic “watching the movie while occasionally shifting around a bit” footage looped back and forth over again with some slight time stretch trickery here and there to make things line up better, and a few deliberately placed talking animations when Crow or one of the other guys have to deliver a really long riff, react strongly to what’s on screen, or talk directly to one of the other riffers.