Brooke Buffington, associate director of career services at the Love School of Business, co-wrote and co-produced the film.
Brooke Buffington, associate director of career services for the Student Professional Development Center, can now add a few new lines to her own resume — movie producer and screenwriter.
“Chalk It Up,” a movie that Buffington wrote and produced with Maddy Curley, has been picked up by Netflix, with work now underway to build an international audience and set a DVD release date for film. The successful pitch to major streaming vendor, Netflix, comes after years of hard work creating and preparing the film for release, and could pave the way for more projects in the future.
“You have to be passionate about your project because you’re going to live with it for three to five years,” Buffington said. “Independent filmmaking is not a quick process.”
The film features Curley in the lead role of a young college student named Apple who tries to form a gymnastics team from a ragtag group of athletes. “When a super girly-girl is dumped by her boyfriend, she decides to do everything she can to get him back by building a college gymnastics team, quickly learning that she is capable of a lot more than just getting an ‘MRS’ degree,” the synopsis reads on IMDB.
View the trailer below:
The route from idea to a Netflix premiere took at least nine years, going back to when Buffington took up screenwriting while in graduate school. Though she is an avid reader, her leisure reading took a back seat to her studies, but that sparked an interest in writing. “I fell into it,” Buffington said. “I had always been a reader, and had never considered myself a writer until then.”
Buffington “fell into it” with her friend Curley, with whom she competed on the University of North Carolina gymnastics team, and who had gone on to land a number of roles in Hollywood. Buffington, who said she’s a storyteller by nature, combined her newfound interest in writing and Curley’s early success in film and TV with their shared interest and experiences as college gymnasts to create “Chalk It Up.”
“It’s easier to write about a world you know,” she said. “You have all the small details figured out, and you don’t have to learn them as you go.”
Stepping into the role of producer proved more challenging. Buffington and Curley undertook the production of the movie without the backing of a major studio and with a limited budget. That meant long hours and a lot of hands-on experiences for the co-producers, with two investors helping out along the way. “You don’t know what you don’t know, so you have to be willing to reach out to anyone who is willing to help, and anyone who knows anything about this industry,” Buffington said. “Every decision that was made, we had a hand in making it. … We produced, totally produced, this entire film.”
The film was shot in a 12-day stretch in September 2014 in Riverside, California, and at the International Gymnastics Camp in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Post-production work took about a year, and the first screening was at the Varsity Theater on Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill, where the pair had gone to school.
Buffington said you have to know your target audience and the market for the story going into the filmmaking process. As gymnasts, they knew that young women in gymnastics would gravitate to the film, with the 2016 Olympics and all the excitement surrounding that international gymnastics competition helping to boost interest.
The 90-minute family friendly film was released on Netflix Nov. 13, and could see wider distribution in the future. In the meantime, Buffington said she’s working on their next project — a television pilot. In the thick of production for “Chalk It Up,” Buffington said she was thinking she would never go through this painstaking process again, but that’s changed now that the movie is produced and released.
“We continue to write — we’re always writing and building our portfolio as screenwriters,” Buffington said.