Protip: Right click the video and set to “Loop” for maximum fun!
View on YouTube here: MST3K “Movie Sign” v1 Loop (bumpy motion, widescreen)
Alternative smooth version here: MST3K “Movie Sign” v1 Loop (smooth motion, widescreen)
I was watching an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 the other day and I thought it might be a fun project to try to recreate the “movie sign” into, where Joel and the bots are forced into the theater, in Blender. This is the result!
It took me a few days to put everything together - I modeled it all from just eye-balling the paused video - and then another day to render it twice (once with a smooth camera motion and once with some bumpiness akin to the original footage.
Everything in the scene was created from scratch in Blender and procedural except for the “4” on the yellow door, which is a texture I brought in from Photoshop.
Originally, I liked the smooth version of the animation better, but once I got the motion matched up to the original, albeit a little more smooth still, the bumpy version became my favorite.
I have a lot of fond memories of watching this show with my family when I was younger, and so I am glad I could pay homage to it in the form of this render. 
This was created in Blender 4.1 and rendered in Cycles. Each frame took between 40 and 130 seconds to render.
The frames each look a little grainy because I wanted it to retain some of the gritty feel of the original, and using the output solely from the denoiser just made it look too clean. In the compositor, I took the denoised image and mixed the noisy image back in at 50%, after pixelating it 2x.
In addition to the videos above, I made tall versions for mobile:
MST3K “Movie Sign” v1 Loop (bumpy motion, tall)
MST3K “Movie Sign” v1 Loop (smooth motion, tall)
Thanks for watching!
