Help make this section useful (tips for riffing)

[RoninFox]

It's pretty much impossible to have a hard and fast rule about talking over dialog.  Some movies give you plenty of room to fit in jokes, other movies just don't.  If you're going to get ANY good jokes into a scene sometimes you have to pick a line to cover up.  It's just a matter from there to make sure you're not covering up lines crucial to the plot or obscuring details that you need for other jokes.  Not every movie I've riffed can be like Star Trek 1 and give me gigantic stretches of staring at viewscreens for me to fill in whatever rants I want.  Sometimes I gotta get in there and fight to fit words in while the characters yammer.

[mikelesq]

This debate kind of reminds me of Roger Ebert's funny hat principal:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19790601/REVIEWS/50601003/1023

To summarize, there's a difference between laughing at a character who's in a funny hat because the hat is funny, and laughing at a character who's wearing a funny hat for a funny reason.  The second sticks with you. 

At a certain point, if you riff over too much dialogue, or important dialogue, so that the movie doesn't make sense, you're not riffing the movie.  You may be riffing on the bad costumes, or the lousy attempt at a French accent, or the boom mike in the shot, but that's not the same as riffing the movie itself.  If the riffing goes with the movie instead of over it, you're riffing the same movie that your audience is watching, and it's a shared experience, which I find more satisfying.  So I don't have a problem if a riff talks over dialogue, as long as it's not so common or intrusive that it feels like a caption contest.

Of course, YMMV.

[Invader_quirk]

It's pretty much impossible to have a hard and fast rule about talking over dialog.  Some movies give you plenty of room to fit in jokes, other movies just don't.  If you're going to get ANY good jokes into a scene sometimes you have to pick a line to cover up.  It's just a matter from there to make sure you're not covering up lines crucial to the plot or obscuring details that you need for other jokes.  Not every movie I've riffed can be like Star Trek 1 and give me gigantic stretches of staring at viewscreens for me to fill in whatever rants I want.  Sometimes I gotta get in there and fight to fit words in while the characters yammer.

I know what you mean. There's a scene in Mission: Impossible 2 where the villain will not shut up, so we keep starting jokes and getting cut off and eventually just yell at him to shut it. Of course, that approach can't be re-used over and over. Other solutions must be found and, yes, that means covering dialog in many cases.

[LucasM]

It's pretty much impossible to have a hard and fast rule about talking over dialog.  Some movies give you plenty of room to fit in jokes, other movies just don't.  If you're going to get ANY good jokes into a scene sometimes you have to pick a line to cover up.  It's just a matter from there to make sure you're not covering up lines crucial to the plot or obscuring details that you need for other jokes.  Not every movie I've riffed can be like Star Trek 1 and give me gigantic stretches of staring at viewscreens for me to fill in whatever rants I want.  Sometimes I gotta get in there and fight to fit words in while the characters yammer.

I know what you mean. There's a scene in Mission: Impossible 2 where the villain will not shut up, so we keep starting jokes and getting cut off and eventually just yell at him to shut it. Of course, that approach can't be re-used over and over. Other solutions must be found and, yes, that means covering dialog in many cases.

I'm having that problem with the original Frankenstein.  There are LONG stretches of no dialogue, then there are stretches where it is intensely tightly packed.  So I go from 'straining to fill the time' to 'straining to fit a word in edgewise'.

There is one hard and fast rule [that I'm making up and setting as 'Rule #1 Re: talking over film dialogue' right here and right now  ]: know the film you are riffing well enough so that you are not going to talk over key plot points!  MK&B have done this on occasion*, and then later made fun of the things as being confusing, when those things were explained clearly in what they talked over.  So they made them confusing by talking over them.  That isn't funny, it is irritating, and makes the riffer look ignorant.

[But any 'non-key-plotpoints' are fully fair game, as long as not done to excess.]

*  one that comes to mind I remember being in Dragonwar; D-War, but I don't remember what the specifics were

[evansT]

Ah, hello. I've been planning on making some iRiffs for a while now, but have a few questions that I've been thinking about for a while now and would be interested in any answers that I could get. Thanks in advance.

1) I'm always a pessimist when it comes to my work, and unsure about whether anyone would actually want to buy an iRiff off me, or whether they'd feel ripped off to buy an iRiff off me if they did. What do you think would be the best way of testing the waters for my series a bit and seeing if people are interested and like my stuff? I'm currently thinking of just making an episode and uploading it for free on YouTube or a site like that, but am unsure what to upload as a tester.
A short would be shorter to write and make and easier for an audience to watch, but I find shorts incredibly hard to write mostly because thanks to the decreased timeframe that you have in order to be funny in, I feel like I need to make every line pure gold, which means that I'm rarely 100% happy with a script for a short.
Riffing an entire film would probably be overkill for an preview that's just trying to see what people think of my progress and work so far. Riffing the first ten minutes of a feature film would probably be the best of both worlds, but would people be interested in watching the first ten minutes of a film and nothing else until I finish work on the rest of it?
So what would you like to see as an preview for a possible iRiff series?

2) How do people test whether their riffs work for both PAL and NTSC DVDs of the film? I'm English and so all my DVDs are PAL, yet if I do release any iRiffs for films on DVD, my main target audience is going to be American and so it's probably best that I release NTSC versions of my riffs as well as the PAL. So if you don't have any NTSC DVDs or DVD players, how would you test if your riffs work for NTSC (aka, how would you make sure that the PAL->NTSC conversion worked, or check that the American and English cuts of a film are completely the same?)

3) What is the general position on riffs for films and shorts that have already been done by other riffers? I know for a fact that there have been riffs for CatWomen of the Moon, Deadtime Stories, etc, and there are more riffs than I can count for shorts like Soapy the Germ Fighter (indeed it's very hard to find a suitable short out there which HASN'T already been done by someone else), but I'm still really interested in doing riffs for these films. If you accidentally write the same joke for a film as someone else has made on another riff of that film with realising it (the amount of times that I've made a riff on a film while watching it on MST3K, only for Joel/Mike and the bots to then make exactly the same joke is surprising; I made the "Roxey, you don't have to put on a red light" joke a good half an hour before Servo did while watching Eegah and punched the air in triumph when I heard him make it too), how is that usually seen and taken?

4) Is there an usual expected release date of a new iRiff from an established riffer, or are most people just happy to take a new riff whenever the makes have finished it?

5) What do you think is the average quality of your normal iRiff? Overall, are they all usually very good? Do you find that they're mostly really good with a few meh ones? Do you find that a lot of them are meh with a few good ones? Are they mostly crap with a few amazing ones? What do you think of them overall?

6) What is the average number of downloads for your normal iRiff? Does anyone actually know?

Wow that's a long and convoluted post. Thanks to anyone to reads this and even more thanks to anyone who can take the time to decipher and answer my questions. And sorry if any of these questions have already been asked, answered and I've just forgot them. Thanks

[mr.b.natural]

3) The general rule of thumb is go for it.  Don't worry about if other iRiffers have done it and there is a school of thought that it actually helps you because people like to compare and contrast the various riffs.  Most people would suggest buying the other riff after you have written yours to make sure there aren't too many similar jokes .  However, I am the one who did Cat Women of the Moon and if you do that I will cut you.    Hmm...probably not a great first impression.  I am joking about the cutting part.  Welcome to the boards by the way.   

4) This one actually made me laugh.  We release iRiffs whenever.  The bigger groups have fans who might jokingly nag for new stuff but no one releases with any regularity.  (Hell, the iRiff uploading is usually busted anyway)  I suppose the smart thing to do would be to only announce a project when you are sure about it and try to market it, but not too much.

5) I'm sure that depends on who you ask.  Most people don't like iRiffs at all because they are not MKB and others have no love for solo riffers and of those who give them a chance a few disappoints can spoil them on the whole experience.  So it's tough to say.  I'm afraid I haven't tried very many in the grand scheme of things but those who are good float to the top and in this business brand loyalty is very important.  You have to find your audience which can be a real trick.  One key is to produce stuff regularly.  Something I'm not very good at. 

6) Have some tissues handy for when you look at your sales figures.  Let's just say you won't be retiring on you iRiff income. 

2) Ask forum member SJP of "The One Man Band" iRiff fame.

1) Oh just do it.  Anything like this requires a certain level of confidence and if you can't at least fake it then you'll just drive yourself crazy with silly doubts and excuses.  This sounds like something others can't really help you with until you release something and then they can provide feedback.  You gotta just sack up and do it.  iRiffs are not for the weak, the doubtful, the meek, or the pessimist.  You have to be secure enough with your material to put it out into the world for inevitable rejection.  It's like stand-up comedy.  It takes courage and the rewards are hardly worth it but if you want to do it because you love it then just do what makes you laugh, what you enjoy doing, and if others like it then great.  If not, fuck 'em, you had fun.         

[fireyf]

Ah, hello. I've been planning on making some iRiffs for a while now, but have a few questions that I've been thinking about for a while now and would be interested in any answers that I could get. Thanks in advance.

1) I'm always a pessimist when it comes to my work, and unsure about whether anyone would actually want to buy an iRiff off me, or whether they'd feel ripped off to buy an iRiff off me if they did. What do you think would be the best way of testing the waters for my series a bit and seeing if people are interested and like my stuff? I'm currently thinking of just making an episode and uploading it for free on YouTube or a site like that, but am unsure what to upload as a tester.
A short would be shorter to write and make and easier for an audience to watch, but I find shorts incredibly hard to write mostly because thanks to the decreased timeframe that you have in order to be funny in, I feel like I need to make every line pure gold, which means that I'm rarely 100% happy with a script for a short.
Riffing an entire film would probably be overkill for an preview that's just trying to see what people think of my progress and work so far. Riffing the first ten minutes of a feature film would probably be the best of both worlds, but would people be interested in watching the first ten minutes of a film and nothing else until I finish work on the rest of it?
So what would you like to see as an preview for a possible iRiff series?

2) How do people test whether their riffs work for both PAL and NTSC DVDs of the film? I'm English and so all my DVDs are PAL, yet if I do release any iRiffs for films on DVD, my main target audience is going to be American and so it's probably best that I release NTSC versions of my riffs as well as the PAL. So if you don't have any NTSC DVDs or DVD players, how would you test if your riffs work for NTSC (aka, how would you make sure that the PAL->NTSC conversion worked, or check that the American and English cuts of a film are completely the same?)

3) What is the general position on riffs for films and shorts that have already been done by other riffers? I know for a fact that there have been riffs for CatWomen of the Moon, Deadtime Stories, etc, and there are more riffs than I can count for shorts like Soapy the Germ Fighter (indeed it's very hard to find a suitable short out there which HASN'T already been done by someone else), but I'm still really interested in doing riffs for these films. If you accidentally write the same joke for a film as someone else has made on another riff of that film with realising it (the amount of times that I've made a riff on a film while watching it on MST3K, only for Joel/Mike and the bots to then make exactly the same joke is surprising; I made the "Roxey, you don't have to put on a red light" joke a good half an hour before Servo did while watching Eegah and punched the air in triumph when I heard him make it too), how is that usually seen and taken?

4) Is there an usual expected release date of a new iRiff from an established riffer, or are most people just happy to take a new riff whenever the makes have finished it?

5) What do you think is the average quality of your normal iRiff? Overall, are they all usually very good? Do you find that they're mostly really good with a few meh ones? Do you find that a lot of them are meh with a few good ones? Are they mostly crap with a few amazing ones? What do you think of them overall?

6) What is the average number of downloads for your normal iRiff? Does anyone actually know?

Wow that's a long and convoluted post. Thanks to anyone to reads this and even more thanks to anyone who can take the time to decipher and answer my questions. And sorry if any of these questions have already been asked, answered and I've just forgot them. Thanks

1)  I'm with Mr. B.  Just go for it.  A free sample is always a good idea.  I actually did a free short on youtube but still put it up for sale.  It's my second best seller.  A full movie sample is okay; it's been done before.  I don't think any writer is every completely satisfied with their work no matter how good it is.  It's just a writer thing.  You're going to be too close to your work to be objective.  Just write what you find funny.

2)  Rifftrax does tell you a specific percentage to change the tempo from NTSC to PAL so I imagine you would just reverse it.  One option for testing is to get a multi-region playing dvd player and get two copies of the disc.  Another option is to find an American iriffer who is willing to be your tester or even make the adjustment for you.  The bonus of this is you get some feedback before you even go live with your riff.

3)  No dibs on movies/shorts.  This has officially been decided amongst us.   We're all pretty easy going just as long as you don't blatantly rip off our jokes (I'm sure you won't).  Like Mr. B said, it gives customers more options for a movie to compare.

4)  We just get riffs out when we get them out.  Some groups like to give an approximate release date.  I don't give release date because I'm slow as a cold turd and I know if I set a release date I probably won't make it.  One word of advice is not to make your product page too far before the product is available for sale.  Otherwise it kind of gets lost in the pile.

5)   It's kind of a mixed bag with quality.  Some are fantastic like Cinester and Hor-riff-ic, and some are horrible like the infamous "Spiderman Parodies."  There are also many different people with different tastes in comedy.  One person might think you suck while another thinks you did great.

6)  Average number of downloads... let's just say don't plan on making a career out of this.  I know for a fact that there are riffers that do much better than I do, but I've been on here since 2008 and still haven't hit the $50 mark.  Again, other groups have done much much better.  I'm a solo riffer and many people won't give us a chance.  Also, you aren't Mike Nelson and that'll make many people not try your riffs at all.  It's kind of unfair because there are some riffers on here who are as funny or much funnier than the Rifftrax crew.  Personally, I like the variety of riffers as opposed to the same three guys all the time.  I buy more iriffs than regular riffs (they do tend cost less too).

Dive in, have fun with this.  Don't let yourself get easily discouraged.  It takes a few riffs and some time for people to notice you.  I hope you find success and welcome to iriffing.

[pezdrake]

Put up a few free shorts on youtube.  It will let you see how the process works of making them and get you in the habit.  As long as you are open to criticism.  You will get it in spades if there are problems.  But better to work those issues out in free riffs than to charge people for them.

[mikelesq]

1)  The internet is Sturgeon's Law to the infinite power.  Simply making an effort will put you ahead of most of what's created for mass consumption on the web.  Take your best shot, put it on YouTube, post a thread here for criticism.  Look at threads here where others have done the same.  If there are areas for improvement, nobody's shy about saying so.  What do you have to lose?
2)  I only do VODs, so I'll leave this to others with experience doing it.
3)  No dibs is the rule.  Believe it or not, joke overlap isn't as common as you'd think (riffs tend to be obvious only in hindsight; if they weren't, they wouldn't be funny).  Given the number of jokes that make up even a 10 minute short, overlaps would normally be minor.
4)  It's a hobby, do it at your leisure.
5)  I rely a lot on what I see on the boards to separate the good from the bad, so I don't really know what "average" would be.  This seems to be linked to your concern #1.  Don't worry about being as good as everyone else.  Make the riff you'd want to listen to.  It's too much work and too little money to worry about crowd appeal.  The satisfaction is in making something you're proud of.  That's not to say that you won't be making an effort as you go to improve, but it should be against your own standard of improvement, informed by criticism, but not driven by popularity.
6)  You're probably noticing that people really don't talk about their individual sales numbers (for a few reasons).  One clear expectation:  You won't publish your first riff and have a floodgate open.  Be prepared to be disappointed the first day, week, etc.  What I've seen is that, as I release new riffs, a few sales of new one usually results in a few sales of your existing materials.  So you're building both a reputation and an inventory as you release new shorts, and that's a process that takes time.

[stansimpson]

Be prepared to be disappointed the first day, week, etc. 

6.5) Your friends and family will not support you either. That's still the biggest shocker to me... esp when there's never been any precedence before such behavior (are we insane or something?). Winning friends over is as hard as putting a whole riff together. Seriously.

[k1]

Be prepared to be disappointed the first day, week, etc. 

6.5) Your friends and family will not support you either. That's still the biggest shocker to me... esp when there's never been any precedence before such behavior (are we insane or something?). Winning friends over is as hard as putting a whole riff together. Seriously.

The truth. He speaks it.

[mikelesq]

Be prepared to be disappointed the first day, week, etc. 

6.5) Your friends and family will not support you either. That's still the biggest shocker to me... esp when there's never been any precedence before such behavior (are we insane or something?). Winning friends over is as hard as putting a whole riff together. Seriously.

The truth. He speaks it.

You know how a doctor can't go to a party without somebody asking for free medical advice?  How a lawyer's friends expect him to write their will for free (even if he's a personal injury lawyer who wouldn't know a will if he saw one in a sandwich)?  If their friends/family expect them to work for free, it's not hard to see that this isn't going to be the way you're going to sell a lot of funny stuff.  Expect that anyone buying your iRiffs will be strangers.

Having said that, when you do make sales, any sales, it's a good feeling.  Look at all of the content on the web, with all the providers struggling to find a financial model when everything is expected to be free.  When someone whips out their credit card and buys your riff, it's a pretty high compliment.

[SJP]

6)  You're probably noticing that people really don't talk about their individual sales numbers (for a few reasons).  One clear expectation:  You won't publish your first riff and have a floodgate open.  Be prepared to be disappointed the first day, week, etc.  What I've seen is that, as I release new riffs, a few sales of new one usually results in a few sales of your existing materials.  So you're building both a reputation and an inventory as you release new shorts, and that's a process that takes time.

Just to add to this one as well...be prepared, even if you make a few, that sometimes some just don't do well.  One I thought would be an okay one saleswise still astounds me with how many picked it up (nothing newsworthy, just shocking to me personally), and one of a more recent film, one I slaved for hours and hours to tweak and make just right, practically bombed.  Believe me, that does hurt.  But if you love it, you pick yourself up and move on.  Lots of people only do one riff, and when it doesn't become a worldwide phenomenon they fret and leave.  It truly is a labor of love, and if you do it solely for the money you are not going to be happy.

2.  Unfortunately, I know the NTSC to PAL conversion tempo, but not PAL to NTSC.  The official NTSC to PAL tempo in the program Audacity (free download) is 4.271, but that's just a more exact way of saying "PAL runs about 4% faster than NTSC."  If somebody knows the exact number, you can put it out there.  And unfortunately, my method for getting PAL times for sync issues may or may not work for you; I use a video editor, and simply export the movie audio into a file I speed up in Audacity.  This works with 99% of most movies made; however, some movies (notably gore films from the '70s and '80s) sometimes have additional cuts or extensions made to them that aren't the same throughout different versions.  Sometimes it's a small thing (Mortal Kombat used to have an edition with 3 seconds of missing footage in the U.K. version, probably having to do with violence or nunchucks, which has since been fixed, I believe), sometimes it's a big thing (completely different or removed scenes), and that's not something easily fixed in a simple PAL conversion.
On the plus side, if you make a VOD, it doesn't matter; if it's the right kind of file (usually MPG, MOV, or MP4), it'll play regardless of region; only stuff like DVD and Blu-ray players care about that kind of crap anymore.  And I should mention that HD content plays the same speed in all regions, so if you are using a Blu-ray copy to work from, chances are it'll work just fine in the U.S., too.

3. And definitely no dibs.  Just this year alone, I started (and finished) a riff that Rifftrax released while I was editing, Quiptracks put one up I had just finished writing, and I'm now working on one that I found out after announcing I was doing it that Rifftrax Presents had done a two years ago.  Won't stop me from doing them, but hey, I can look at the bright side, buy riffs (and help fellow riffers at the same time) and find new ways to make fun of something...maybe even something less obvious than first comes to mind.

1. Don't ask what people want to see, think about what you want to do.  I don't care who says it, if you don't find it funny, you're not playing to your strengths.  That's the great thing about iRiffs...there's no one style.  I've listened to many different iRiffs, and the nice thing about them, as fireyf says, it's not just Mike, Kevin and Bill, who are very funny, but with so many people out there doing stuff it's nice to hear the variety.

[RoninFox]

2) How do people test whether their riffs work for both PAL and NTSC DVDs of the film? I'm English and so all my DVDs are PAL, yet if I do release any iRiffs for films on DVD, my main target audience is going to be American and so it's probably best that I release NTSC versions of my riffs as well as the PAL. So if you don't have any NTSC DVDs or DVD players, how would you test if your riffs work for NTSC (aka, how would you make sure that the PAL->NTSC conversion worked, or check that the American and English cuts of a film are completely the same?)

To convert PAL to NTSC you can use Audacity to change the tempo by -4.96.  If you use a different program that changes the "ratio" instead (Like when I use Adobe Audtion) the ratio to use is 95.904.  The only real ways to test it though is, as suggested above, find someone with the NTSC dvd and send them a copy to test or get a multi-region dvd player and import yourself a copy.  I do the outside tester method when I make a PAL copy of one of my riffs.  Usually I'll start by putting up the product page and granting the file to my tester, ScottH, which you can do before you put the riff up for sale.  He then downloads it and tries it out, telling me if it lined up right.  There've only been a couple times I've had to make changes due to differences between versions, and they're usually minor.  I know that all depends on the movie though, so YMMV.  If you want a little more time before releasing it to make sure both versions work, I'd suggest sending it to your tester through some kind of filesharing service, like DivShare, where you can put a password on it then take it down once you know the tester has it.

[Didgeboy287]

Greetings, veterans of iRifftopia,

A few friends of mine and I have finally gotten around to writing our first iRiff.  (Back in AZ we used to have mst parties and seriously script a movie etc etc while MST was still on the air as I bet most of you have) Anyway, I had some technical questions that I'd like to answer so we can record just as soon as the writing is ready.  I'm curious how, generally, the roughly 2 hour mp3 is recorded.  Do you generally hit record and just march straight through?  My thinking is to use Windows Movie Maker.  If I can import the movie, then I can also record the intro/synch lines/commentary as snippets and synch them to the movie, then extract a single mp3.  Or maybe that's the hard way.  I've seen Audacity mentioned a lot, along with a few others so maybe I'm barking up the wrong bush.  That's why I'm asking.  Thanks for taking the time and it's fantastic to finally get involved with such a rock solid mistie community.

ps I see almost 30 smileys available but no mst silhouettes?