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Some friends of mine and I are making our own MST3K. Does anyone have any recommendations on what equipment to use and where to get it?

Some friends of mine and I are making our own MST3K. Does anyone have any recommendations on what equipment to use and where to get it?

The "Seats" can be simple card-board cut-outs

Infact thats just what they where on MST3K orgionaly was Cardboard painted black(They entualy got a more stable fixed Wooden background half way through the first season if I remeber) and you can sit in cheap plastic $9.99 Metal Chairs to do the filming if you want, remeber they only see the backdrop not the seats


A nice $1k Projector would be best however I know that most Rental places will rent them nowadays for $10 a day or $40 a week

Darth Servo wrote:Some friends of mine and I are making our own MST3K. Does anyone have any recommendations on what equipment to use and where to get it?

Depends on how you want to do it. You could film a cardboard cutout of theatre seats against a bluescreen and then chroma-key the movie in. THe black lines wouldn't be noticeable. Are you using puppets?

Its probably going to be pretty low budget. My main concerns are mixing the original film with our "commentary" and maing sure all the jokes are heard. I guess I should have been more specific: video and audio equipment.

Darth Servo wrote:Its probably going to be pretty low budget. My main concerns are mixing the original film with our "commentary" and maing sure all the jokes are heard. I guess I should have been more specific: video and audio equipment.

For audio, worry more about the environment you're recording in. A small, echoless room would work the best.

Wouldn't hurt to rent some lav mics and a mixer if you're doing that. Either that, or keep a tape recorder handy and dub it over in post.

I've done a lot of amateur video, and in my experience, simple is best.

I'd recommend first getting the movie to be lampooned on DVD, so that you can mess around with it on your comp. My personal choice for an editor is Sonic Foundry's Vegas Video, which you can either buy for a bunch of cash, or you can get the demo off the internet, and then you can find serials for it on any good P2P service.
For audio, get in a small, quiet room (not the bathroom) and record it with the mic on a digital camcorder. Mess around with this technique a bit to make sure you know how to do it to get the desired effect. It sounds pretty stupid, but it works; my first movies were all done in this manner, and I wouldn't dream of doing it in any other way on a small budget. You can mix the audio from these recordings in extremely easily with any digital video editor.
For the seatbacks, I would do them in Flash, but you might want to film yourselves in front of a bluescreen. That's just way too much of a hassle in my book, but if it catches your fancy, go for it.
When it's all done, you can output to DVD or VCD.

Making your own MST3K sounds like fun. If making it is difficult, you're doing something you don't need to be doing; it should all be easy.