Work your way to Regular status and that title will be like putty in your hands.
Iâm a regular, if you want the title updated just let me know what you want it to say!
Hey guys⊠Itâs been a while.
I admit, I pretty much ghosted the forums and abandoned working on this project almost 8 months ago. Sorry about that.
It was all going swimmingly and Iâd just started copying over subtitles for the first theater segment when our landlord phoned up out of the blue to inform us they were selling the house weâd been renting without incident for the last 6 years, without any sort of advanced warning. (Actually, the warning was âour realtor Chip will be swinging by to put up a âfor saleâ sign in your front yard tomorrow⊠and we start showings next weekâ). Which left me to drop everything Iâd been working on and spend every spare moment cramming possessions into cardboard boxes while frantically scrolling through Zillow listings for some sort of vaguely-affordable house or apartment we could move into in a hurry in quite literally the worst housing/rental market anywhere in the entire United States (Okay, technically, weâre tied for âtop worstâ with Miami.)
Then, on top of that, right about the time we finally found something in our price range and were learning about the fun and magical world of first-time mortgage applications, my dad (who was already a bit crazy) went even more crazy, and decided the invisible nefarious âhackerâ that had been slowing down his PC, rearranging his desktop icons, and forcing his computer to make strange beeping noises occasionally⊠as hackers so famously do, had seized control of his bank accounts and rather than attempting to confirm whether any money had been taken out (it hadnât) or if any of his paranoid delusions were the slightest bit true (they werenât) he called his bank and told them to shut down everything⊠and then promptly had a stroke in his kitchen and ended up in the hospital for several weeks (which in retrospect, might have explained some of the increased craziness and paranoia).
So the last several months have been a whirlwind of crap, but we did eventually manage to purchase and squeeze everything we own into an overpriced fixer-upper we can just barely afford a couple of towns over, and get my dad into an equally overpriced care facility where heâs made an astonishing recovery back to his usual obstinate demanding self just quickly enough that I have to constantly resist the urge to smother him with a pillow like TVâs Frank.
Iâm slowly piecing my life back together, and my daily stress level is now cranked up to a mere 8.5 instead of all the way to 11. There are even days when I briefly consider leaving the house to go do something that isnât an emergency run to Home Depot. But between dealing with the joys of new home ownership and my dad, I basically have zero time left over to spend on any sort of fun or creative projects that take longer than an hour to complete.
So if anybody else wants to pick up and do anything with wherever it was we left off, be my guest. Otherwise, I might have the time and energy to pick it up again in⊠I donât know. Six months? A year? Two years?
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The way this project went is not unlike many other projects of its type: high hopes quickly followed by abandonment. If you guys ended up with a script after that flurry of activity, this day and age of cellphone cameras and easy chroma key technology should make it relatively simple to get a video put together. All those jokes wouldnât have to go to waste. You could cast off any notions of trying to make it âgoodâ, and just get it done. Get that D- grade so you can graduate without having to go to summer school and miss out on the rafting trip with your friends before having to get a job at Burger Clown when your parents kick you out of the house. And, maybe, youâll be spurred on to make a second one where with what you learned making the first one you could make a second one in half the time. Smooth out the hood. Make it a real rod.
Oh my. Thatâs awful! Iâm glad youâve reached a place of ⊠less-horrifying-emergency.
Though I donât have the time/knowledge/patiences/fortitude to pick up the project I have been wondering if it will go ahead and Iâll be looking forward to whatever comes of it, whenever that happens. Good luck with⊠everything!
I still have interest in the project, but I remember getting confused at our âriff producingâ step. We had votes, medals, and such, but Iâll need to refresh my memory as to how the spreadsheet actually looked when we left it.
Youâre a MOD now?! Good for you!
I lost track of this project. We had a Board of Directors or something. I stepped out at that point, as I didnât want to dominate it. It was a lot of fun getting as far as we did. I would totally do it again. Funny thing, though: The more MST3K I watch (never saw Invasion USA until last week!), the more of our own riffs I see have already been done by the pros! But I hear thatâs not unusual, and they will even reuse their own riffs. And that âwheels downâ stock footage â Iâve found that in four movies now! Nuts.
80% of the script was set. There are just a few decisions left about tied riffs, juggling timing, and overall flow. It could be picked up at any time and completed (though we discussed the possibility of different scripts for different end products).
Here are the contributions. Anyone can view; six people have edit access. The last edit was in January. Copies of old versions were kept.
Back in January, I did a production test (on an unrelated self-riffed short) put together in Adobe Premiere, which used text captions over looped silhouette footage taken from the end credits of MST3K: The Movie, as well as a few other video editing tricks to add in the door sequence, a custom MST3K ball logo, and even a variation of the classic boring-voiced guy pre-title card. I posted details of how I did it here.
Obviously this is probably way more involved than anybody wants to take on at the moment, but one important takeaway was that just about everybody agreed our captions need to be up onscreen for a lot longer than we originally timed for.
Exactly how long, was a bit harder to agree upon, but I was using an average of 3 to 4 seconds for a single sentence riff (about 50 to 70 characters) or about 1.5 times as long as it took to speak the line out loud, but while the captions seemed okay to me at this speed (possibly because I wrote the jokes and my brain was able to process them faster through recognition memory than if somebody else had written them and I was reading them fresh), other people were saying they needed to be up on screen for as long as 6 or even 8 seconds, which totally throws off even our most conservative riff timing on the google sheet.
Additionally, I found that at least in caption format, the âthree secondâ rule applied, and anything that took longer than this to say needed to be split up across multiple caption screens, creating a log jam effect that absolutely murdered the timing of the joke.
And bare minimum, there needs to be a 0.15 second âoffâ gap between caption slides to cue your eyes and brain that the first caption has ended and you should start reading again from the top. If you just slam straight into the next caption it causes your brain to have a brief âwhoa, where am I?â moment, like somebody bumped you mid-paragraph while reading a book, and it actually takes longer to reset and reorient yourself, than if youâd just inserted the 0.15 second gap to begin with.
Due to these various timing and logistical issues, my opinion was (and still is) that itâs impossible to come up with a fan script that keeps everybodyâs jokes intact exactly as written⊠and still have it be physically produceable. And sooner or later, weâre just going to have to resign ourselves to there being multiple versions of this or any other fan scripts we work on.
The fan script can be literally just the highest voted riffs cued up at the appropriate time codes, not really worrying about the practicality of whether they fit on screen, how long theyâd take an actor to say, whether they step on important movie dialogue, or how tricky it would be to pull off any shadowrama sight gagsâŠ
The production script (whether that be captions only or full shadowrama, puppets, and/or voice actors) would be more âbased on a novel byâ using the original spreadsheet as a starting point⊠But if the goal is to produce something that can be watched like a real episode, there would need to be considerable changes along the way, and many riffs would have to be dropped, reworded, shuffled around, or replaced entirely to fit the limitations of the production medium and/or the people volunteering to animate/voice/puppeteer it. Everybody who worked on the original version would still get a writerâs credit, but as with the real MST3K writers room, just because you came up with a real zinger that made everyone laugh during the freeballing stage, doesnât mean itâs guaranteed to make it into the final script because sometimes even the best gags simply donât fit the space.
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So for anyone who participated in this project you may be interested to know that the next The Mads are Back live riff will be⊠The Incredible Petrified World !
Tix are $10 plus a $2.15 fee
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Iâm sure at least some of you have heard of Udio, the new AI driven song-writing website, where you can use text prompts (including lyrics you wrote yourself) to try to construct something close to a finished song.
I inserted the lyrics I wrote for my skit song from this project, You And Me In A Cave Under The Sea, into Udio just to see what would happen, and the answer is a song that sounds absolutely nothing like my original intended version, other than it being vaguely doo-woppy.
I was going for something with more of an acapella Five Satins sort of vibe with a finger snapping backing chorus and maybe a little bit of When I Held Your Brain in My Arms in the mix, but you canât have everything.
At any rate, for the curious, hereâs an AI version of You and Me In A Cave Under The Sea, or at least the parts I could convince it to make after about 100 different tries.
