I wouldn’t worry about this at all as a factor in the voting. A lot of jokes only work if you complete the actor’s sentences for them, or talk over the next line because the gag is a response to something that was said in the middle. It’s pretty easy to do audio ducking these days, and for text only riffs… who cares?
I’d say the only time to be concerned is if your riff length:
Overwrites another funnier riff that needs to come after it.
is so long and complex it becomes difficult to parse.
Or has to be split across multiple smaller captions to fit on the screen, which can be difficult to pay attention to if there’s also movie dialogue going on at the same time, or the scene has already transitioned on to something else by the time you can realistically finish reading it.
However, there are long stretches of this movie with no dialogue whatsoever, and here, you can and should feel free to go hog wild with your riff length. I’ve got one multi-part gag during the 4 minutes it takes them to swim up from the diving bell into the cave system that involves providing David Attenborough style nature documentary narration for what’s happening on screen. This works fine during a silent scene… totally wouldn’t work in part of the movie that’s dialogue heavy with it constantly cutting back and forth between action on the diving bell and action on the boat.
Those are the challenges, indeed. I’ve thrown in a couple of short songs; a Crow rant about how there are no “doctors” in the film, just “misters”; another about what a useless leader Craig is; a figure-skating style commentary. Random stuff. We’ll see what sticks.
What I find harder is busting through the walls of dialogue. I’ve got a bunch of those with just nothing…
I think I’m just about done. Maybe one more full viewing with the wife, and I’ll take a break until we’re ready to push on. I hope we can get a consistent 2 or 3 choices per segment when we finish this part.
Just finished uploading my riffs for block 3A (The incredibly boring wandering around bit before Cave Torgo shows up)
That one was a real dog. Took me five days to get through 11 minutes of film. Sheesh! I can see why this one never made it onto the actual show. At least it builds up a tiny bit of steam towards the back 1/4 of the movie once you finally get out of the caves and back to Matheny, but there’s 22 minutes of continuous interminable cave-wandering footage back to back to back. Why the hell didn’t Warren try to break that **** up by shooting a couple of extra scenes on the boat? Maybe have them try to ride out that approaching storm they were talking about? Hell, even a shot of Matheny quietly sitting in his office rewinding the film onto his projector would have been a welcome break.
While I make a riff about it, if anyone’s looking for a sketch idea, I realized the entire middle section of this movie is basically one terrible DOS text adventure game consisting entirely of: Go North, Eat Fish, Read Letter, Throw Letter, Go North, Look Wall, Search Wall, Go South, Go South, Go South… Go South. Look Caveman. Talk Caveman…
I’ve got one, where after discovering the dead end/cave anu s, Craig starts muttering as he leaves: “I swear, if I have to film another walking scene, I’m going to jam these so far up Jerry Warren’s…”
Home stretch now! Just the last two theater segments left!
3b was so much easier to riff than 3a.
While watching this part, I realized they never actually refer to Ingol by name at any point during the film. Bit rude to crash a guy’s cave, eat his fish, then leave him to die in a volcanic eruption and never ask for his handle.
I refer to him as “Ogg” a few times at the beginning of the segment when he’s acting kind of primitive and caveman-y, but if we decide to give him a name (in addition to “Cave Torgo,” of course) we’ll probably want to try to make it consistent across the board.
True that. It’s funny how we get the four survivor’s full names when they are introduced to Ingol, but Ingol never introduces himself. How rude. But, be fair, he is a caveman.
I see you, edging along from start to finish. It would bore me doing it that way. I just watch through, sprinkling riffs, sometimes focusing on areas that needs strategic comedic carpet bombing.
I’ve made a bit of a mess with the timing of my riffs on the spreadsheet.
For some of them, I used the column B dialog cues, but for others, I used the archived movie timestamps and matched them to column A’s time code.
What are we officially using for the timecodes? The Youtube video? I worry that could become unavailable before the project is complete (simply because of random Internet file lifespans, etc.).
The Youtube file linked in the Google sheet (tab 1a) is the official timeline. Between the timeline in column A and the script in column B, I hope that’s enough for people to put the riffs where they ought to go.
Even still, riffs are expected to drift +/- one second, so we’ll have to use some common sense when review them to vote.
Timing is everything when it comes to comedy, so I expect every riff caption will have to be lovingly placed by hand to ensure maximum comedic impact. The google sheet is just a road map to get us in the general ballpark.
While this is more of a conversation for the production thread, even though we’re using the YouTube version for timing, I’m assuming we’ll want to use the nicer looking Archive.org print as our master source since it’s the highest quality print I’ve seen (1.1GB, 1080p widescreen) available for free online. Also since they have the entire film for download directly off their website, we have a slightly higher reassurance that it is the public domain print and not one that’s been bought up and copyrighted again later as part of the Wade Williams collection.
This is the version I’ve been using for my own riff writing, and I notice that it appears to be about 2-seconds off from @MyWy’s sheet. (So when I copy and paste my stuff over I’m kind of guessing where it belongs based on his script cues on the side) Everything will have to be tweaked in the final production version, but it’ll have to be tweaked anyways once we add in the commercial breaks and (possibly) door sequences.