Almost a whole year ago, while the second season of My Babysitter’s a Vampire was in production, I got the chance to sit down with Tim Burns, the screenwriter of the MBV movie and the lead writer and co-producer of the series! We talked about how the story and characters changed during the writing process, what inspirations he draws on in his writing and even some of the rules for magic and monsters in the Whitechapel universe… and then I had to stay quiet about it to avoid spoiling any surprises!
Now that new episodes of MBV are airing on Disney Chanel we’re finally opening the vault doors and letting all of you in on a very special behind the scenes look at the hit show!
Brendan: The fans know a lot about the actors on the show but not nearly as much about the other people who make it happen. In your own words, what do you do?
Tim: What do I do? I ask myself that on a daily basis! I was involved in this project starting shortly after ‘ground zero’. Tom [McGillis] and Jen [Pertsch] had had the original idea for Babysitter; I think they’d come up with that with Brian [Irving] and George [Elliot]. But it was quite different when it first started. They already had this fantastic three page pitch about the fundamentals of what the series is, all the core ideas for the story. I came in about early 2009 when Fresh TV wanted to do the movie. I looked at what they had and I had some ideas of my own that involved adding some characters and changing some characters.
Brendan: How did the characters change from that initial story idea?
Tim: If I think back to the original, original pitch, I think Ethan was a bit more of an average, skateboard-crazy, everyman kid. I’m more of a geek; I ate at the nerd table in the cafeteria and I had my nerdy friends and we were always on the outside so I pitched a version that was a little more about these outsiders. I think the central idea for me was that they could be getting chased by vampires, they could be about to be killed, but if one of those vampires was a good looking girl they’d be just as excited about that as seeing a vampire. I think that’s a tough decision when you’re young! That was where I started, drawing from my own background. I brought that into the movie when I wrote it.
Brendan: What were the biggest changes to the concept itself?
Tim: Ideas like the Benny’s grandmother being a wiccan earth priestess started to spin into it because I mistakenly thought the vampire craze would have played itself out two years from then. I thought that Twilight was so huge that two years from then people would be so sick to death of vampires so I said it shouldn’t be just a vampire show, it should be a world that combines the best of all those mythological creatures so we could do a werewolf episode, so we could do trolls or pixies and vampires are just part of that ‘family’. That’s why I liked the idea of Benny as the spellmaster and Ethan with his seer abilities and expanding the world so every week it wouldn’t just be, “Oh no, you’re a vampire!”
We’ll be bringing you more of my interview with Tim in weeks to come. In the meantime, you can catch another new episode of My Babysitter’s a Vampire tonight at 7:30 PM on Disney Chanel and a marathon of the first four episodes of Season 2 this Saturday, July 28th, from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM!
Stay fresh,
Brendan
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