Watching The Movie....

[Afgncaap5]

I've often gotten into debates with an aquaintance of mine about how the the movie segments were filmed.

One of us maintains that they blue/green screened the whole thing. How else do they put in the time coding for things like Assignment Venezuela?

Another of us maintains that they were actually watching the movie on some giant movie screen. If they didn't do it this way, how could they so accurately point to things and gesture at the object of their jokes?

I decided to put the debate to rest once and for all and do some good solid research. But guess what? The Brains who've been interviewed over the years all apparently just assumed that the audience knew which of the two methods was used, so they didn't speak about it frequently enough for me to track down written evidence one way or the other.

So, does anyone here know? Anyone here go on tours of BBI while they were in operation? Anyone here watch MST3K: The Home Game and get an explanation (or maybe "This Is MST3K")? I honestly can't find solid evidence for either theory.

[Monstrcaldgamera]

In seasons 1-3 they sat in front of a green screen, with a small TV below them, timecoded. They read from scripts which were also timecoded.

Then in seasons 5-10 they changed the screen to white, because it provided a clearer image, you can tell by taking a season 2 episode and sitting it next to a Sci-fi episode. (Of course you might have to do more than just sit the tapes next to eachother, I geuss it would be a little more obvious if you acutally watched them).

Either way, the Brains filmed the sequences and then chromakeyed (later lumakeyed) the movie in.

I got all this info from Jef Zehnder's Shadowramma Turorial, for my [glow=red,2,300]fan production[/glow] (plug plug plug!!!!).

Uhhh...here it is...www.astroreverb.com/ca/shadow/shadowrama.html

[mightyjack]

As to being able to point to the screen. I don't know for a fact if BBI used monitors like this... But your local weatherman has monitors on each side of their weather map (off screen), and that's how they know where to point at any given area.

[Esoteric]

I remember seeing the old (and crappy!) "This Is MST3K" documentary on Comedy Central - I still have it on tape - and there are a couple of in-theatre shots there. As someone here has said, they indeed used a blue screen while watching a monitor on the ground. The gesturing was, in fact, done with a very good sense of spatial relationships. I suspect it's not as hard as it seems to approximate it.

Furthermoe, if you watch early episodes such as "The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy" where Joel does such screen-interaction as covering the mouth of the Aztec singing lady, you'll notice he DOESN'T get it quite right - he was obviously still learning at that point, and doesn't get his hand over her mouth like it should be.

[Afgncaap5]

Yeah, it's the kind of thing that probably takes a while to get just right.

I think I'll build a gigantic movie screen just for watch B-Movies.

[Phantom Engineer]

It's kind of like the wheather on TV. Their standing in front of a blank screen and watching a monitor off camera to see what their pointing at. It would take a little practice to make it look natural.