BTS: Wyatt Meets Tom Servo

Last Sunday, I released my latest video, “Wyatt meets Tom Servo.” This video was inspired both by my love for “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” and the fact that I’ve owned a production copy of Tom Servo since last Christmas. The last week of November felt like a great time to produce a MST3K inspired video because of its association with Thanksgiving. It made its premiere around Thanksgiving in 1988, and a marathon of fan favorite episodes play every Thanksgiving.

The premise of the video was that Wyatt would star in his own MST3K-like show, a concept I’ve been toying with called “Mars Needs Content.” Much like Joel Robinson, my characters have found themselves stuck on board a rocketship which is traveling to Mars, but instead of watching bad movies they are producing YouTube content they’re going to transmit to Mars when they get closer. The gist of the idea was that Mars wants to start its own YouTube platform, but being bad at it they need to import the videos from somewhere. So, they’ve reached out to Earth with demands for videos.

But, for the sake of this video, it is just Wyatt giving an introduction but then being interrupted by “Autopilot,” the ship’s robot pilot. Although he sounds more like a Cylon, in my mind he harkens back to the pilot of Moira from “Farscape,” in that he does not leave the cockpit and must communicate with Wyatt via internal video.

The highlight comes when the shot switches to Tom Servo. While Wyatt is star struck, Tom Servo is really calling to complain because he feels that the show is too similar to his own. But, they smooth over their differences before Tom Servo cuts the call short because the “Mads are calling.”

The exchange between Wyatt and Tom Servo is also reminiscent of the scenes in MST3K when they would run across other beings in the solar system and put them up on the hexfield. I would have wanted to recreate this effect, but fell short on resources, time, and patience.

For past productions, I’ve recorded the puppets in front of a background superimposed onto the green screen, a little like how the maps are shown when weathermen give their forecast. This helped me save time by lining up the puppets with their backgrounds, but had the downside of being much trickier to get the background right. For this shoot, I recorded all of the puppets in front of the green screen, and then inserted the backgrounds later during editing. This had the benefit of being able to line up the footage of the puppets with their backgrounds so I could do things like make the robot appear to be sitting in a seat, but kept me from catching flaws such as Tom Servo’s domed head nearly disappearing.

People often ask questions about creating green screen effects. I’m not an expert, but the process really isn’t that hard. The trickiest part really is the lighting, because shadows can ruin a shot. And, sometimes I’ve had to suffer with a background which was a little lighter than I preferred because the chroma key effect was making my character disappear.

Recording the lines from the puppets took some time. I will usually record multiple characters in one of two ways. I will either record them saying their lines one shot at a time, so I end up with multiple videos to cut together, or I’ll record one long shot of the different puppets saying their lines. In this case, I tried the latter, because for me it felt more like a conversation, which helped to maintain the energy of the characters’ exchange throughout the skit.

Once the video was shot, I used Microsoft’s Clipchamp to edit everything together. When editing a skit, it can be tricky to locate the best shots, eliminate all of the screw-ups, and then blend everything together until they make sense. My biggest frustration can be catching those bits at the tail end of a shot where I am finished and lowering the puppet. It feels natural when I am shooting with the puppets, but then there’s nothing really to end on in a given scene, so I have to do a lot of creative trimming.

Am I a fan of clipchamp? No, not really. But, it does make it easy to use chroma key. There is an effect you can effect which will remove the green color and allow you to add in the background that you need. A slider control lets me adjust the transparency of my footage to allow the background to appear. This really is where the magic happens because if you go too far, you will start to lose the edge of your character.

Something else that I tried out for this video was the layering of different elements so that I would create the effect of the Robot and Tom Servo appearing on some kind of viewing screen. I needed to establish that Tom Servo was calling from somewhere else off the ship, so first I had the robot call, then switched to the footage of Tom Servo. I dropped the frame of the screen once I felt that I had established what was going on.