How to Create MST3K Effect?

[pseudosafari]

How would you go about creating the Mystery Science Theater 3000 look? Specifically, I have movies I created that I want to make a “spoof” of by showing the heads of people (family and friends) watching it in a theater and commenting on it.

Would you film it and use their silhouette (and, if so, how do you light it to keep the image 100% black but have a green screen (?) preserved in front of it?)?

Or do you animate it in Flash?

I could Photoshop a picture to put on top of the video, but then the characters wouldn’t move.

If you’re unfamiliar with MST3K, here’s a sample.

[jerronsmith]

I believe in MST3K it was just an animated static graphic. You can create the graphic in Photoshop and then animate it in Photoshop, After Effects, Flash or whatever animation program you have.

From the animation program export either an image sequence with an alpha channel or video with an alpha channel. You should then be able to bring it into your NLE and just lay it over the video to produce the effect.

[pseudosafari]

Thanks–this gets me on the right track! I’ll give it a shot.

[jerronsmith]

If you want to have a lot of motion in the effect you could also shoot people against a high contrast background and use then use a keying effect in a program like after effects to remove the background.

I have done that before using green and blue screens, but technically for the effect any background that contrasted with your actors, props, whatever in the foreground would work fine.

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