The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 7: Afterwords

When we finished our feature, I asked myself 2 questions: what did I learn from Babysitters? And would I do it again?

I learned a lot, things that I wouldn’t have learned by taking a class. I also didn’t learn things I would have learned in class, but, overall, I think I came out ahead with practical experience in no-budget preproduction, production, and post-production.

I learned 3 key lessons overall. There might be more, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

First: you need a strong script before anything else. Your entire project is at the mercy of the first telling, the script, and any weaknesses in that first telling will multiply in the second telling (production) and the third telling (post-production) unless you are fortunate enough to spot those mistakes and correct them while you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of having a plot or characters that doesn’t engage your audience.

Our shooting script was an unedited first draft because we did no story editing at all. This was a mistake—the script wasn’t ready, despite having some good scenes and gags in it, and the story was overly complicated and self-indulgent. We didn’t kill our babies, those bits we loved that didn’t move the story forward. I don’t think we were alone in making this mistake—I’ve seen other rookies do the same, and even the pros crank out crap based on bad scripts (Phantom Menace is probably the best example I can think of right now. It had some interesting ideas and new characters, but a good story editor could have cleaned up a lot of the babies that should have been killed in that movie—and still pleased both the kiddie audience and the hardcore fans).

We now spend a lot of time working on scripts—most of the time, actually. In the last 12 months, we’ve had 4 shooting days, but we’ve spent 5-6 months working on story ideas and writing scripts and story editing and rewriting and all that other fun stuff.

With Mullet working on the comic books, I’ve become the principle writer on our shorts, so he comes in only when I think the script is ready for him to see. He approaches the scripts as a story editor does, looking at the story first and giving notes on his reactions to it beat by beat. Sometimes, I have something he likes and we shoot it unchanged. Sometimes, I end up rewriting several times before we shoot it. But, most of the time, he doesn’t like it and I throw the script out.

Second, every hour you spend on preproduction will save you a great deal of trouble later on. We managed to shoot 120 pages of script with 2 dozen actors, countless shots and takes, on dozens of locations, on weekends spread out over 8 months. We did this equipped only with a handful of Excel and Word documents. Every hour I spent preparing shot lists, call sheets, and all the other logistical stuff saved us hours on shooting days, and saved us hours again in post-production. On later projects, I’ve started drawing crude storyboards (complete with my stick figures) to make sure I’ve got the visual stuff worked out. I’ve even done rough animatics with scanned storyboards and dubbed audio, just to make sure it works on screen. You can leave things to chance, but the odds are usually against you. It’s not easy putting a story onto film or video, so why make it harder to do so if you’re forcing yourself to make it up as you go along?

Third: learn from your mistakes and practice what you’ve learned in the next project. I’ve made a few shorts to learn specific things that I knew I hadn’t grasped or tried in Babysitters, and I’ve read more books, taken a producing class and a directing class, and watched a lot of videos to further what I knew or didn’t know when we made Babysitters. We’ve completed two shorts and started on 3 others since that time, and the lessons we learned from Babysitters have paid off with these latter efforts. Each time I do a project now, I decide in advance what I want to learn from it, and I’d recommend that approach as I think it forces you to give yourself hands-on experience with a new skill. Why do something if you’re not learning from the experience?

With so many hours of production under our belts, Mullet and I have learned to work quite well as a team. We tend to approach comedy from a feel rather than anything mechanical, so we shoot until it feels right. We usually shoot our rehearsals as takes, but I think we’re much faster at finding the beats now. We’re much better at writing scripts and story-editing them.

Would I do it again? Yes. Without hesitation, I would do it again.

I should clarify that if I could go back to the year 2000, I would. Back then, YouTube didn’t exist and online video wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most video projects were more-or-less demo reels on VHS tape, with very few seen outside of filmmakers’ friends, video nights at comedy clubs or, even rarer, on a specialty cable TV channel. The means of getting video out to large numbers of people was there, but it was slow and cumbersome despite whatever format (QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real Player) you used. VHS was king! Streaming video was still in its infancy, and video files were too large even for downloads for the average user. DVD-R burners were just starting to appear on new computers (by the time we finished post in late 2002, however, the DVD-R had begun to replace the VHS tape as the preferred format).

For anyone reading this today, unless you have a time machine, forget trying to make a feature on videotape—stick to shorts until someone pays you to make a feature.

If we were starting out from scratch today, instead of a 74-minute feature, I think we’d make 15-20 shorts (5 minutes and less) instead, committing to a similar schedule. We would make mistakes early on, but the repetition of doing 15 shorts over a long schedule would help us find our feet just as Babysitters did. At the end, we’d have a selection of 15 shorts to choose to put online, on DVD, enter into festivals and competitions, or whatever future channels of opportunity emerge.

That’s the end of my look back to our “boot-camp” project. Thanks for reading, and watch for a taste of Babysitters on the Miller & Mullet DVD.