The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 6: Revisiting the Past

We sat down and watched Babysitters recently. I hadn’t watched it since some time in 2003 or 2004, so I’d forgotten a lot of things about it. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten about most of it.

I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.

So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.

The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….

The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.

The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.

So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.

The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.

I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.