Those of you who know Brandy Smith, the Receptionist for Urbana School District 116, knows she loves to joke and tell humorous stories about her kids. What you may not know (is) that Ms. Smith is also a writer, script consultant, as well as a mother of two. She has worked on feature films such as Batman and Transformers as production assistance. Her writing has taken her to visit Cuba the previous summer after helping a director develop his characters and plots. 

“I’m not gonna tell you what year [I attended Columbia] because that will tell you how old I am,”

Brandy started her writing career when she attended Columbia College. “I’m not gonna tell you what year [I attended Columbia] because that will tell you how old I am,” she jokes. “My roommate at the time started her production company called Real Soul Ink. She was getting all these scripts and she couldn’t keep up with them [Scripts]. People wanted her to work on their projects, so she would say, “Hey will you read this for me.” and so it started from there. I started script consulting for her because I would say well this is a good script but the plot is not there or the character development is not there. She would hook me up with the person who wrote the script. [I would] help them develop the characters and develop the plots and that’s how I got into the writing side of it and then I became a part of her production company. Although her production company is small, she worked on some big movie productions as they came to the city [Chicago].

Mentors have been a huge influence in Brandy Smith’s life. “My influences are my friend Kristina, she’s the one that said you know you’re good. You need to go out there. I think if she didn’t push me I wouldn’t be there and other influences are some instructors that I’ve had when I studied at The Second City. They also pushed me and let me know my comedy is good.”

Brandy told Recruitment & Retention her dream is to someday win an Oscar, “And have a Tyler Perry type studio. I would love to be able to write full time. and it’d be really cool if I could work with Quinton Tarantino. I just want to get that one good solid film out there. If that’s the only film I do, fine. But I would like to get one out there.”

Her dream is not far, Brandy listed her accomplishments working on big films and traveling. She has years of experience. “I’ve been doing [script consulting] probably about fifteen years for Independent filmmakers. I have a hard time showing my own work to somebody else but I have entered the Sundance Film Festival twice. I’m still developing scripts and also developing a web series.” 

Of many things Brandy is, she is a mom first. “With my dream of writing, it gets kind of difficult because, of course, [there are] kids. Their priorities are tops, so, I really struggle with their needs versus what my needs are.” Brandy describes how she balances the three roles she plays, balancing being a writer, with work, and being a single mom. “My biggest struggle is making sure that my kids get what they want, not necessarily materialistically, but to keep them creative and happy and these two are.”

“We’ll make like a small script, draw stories out in a notepad and what it does is help my writer’s block because it distracts me from where my story is”

Brandy finds time to work on her writing once the kids are asleep. That gives her at least one hour each day to “get down to business”. She, in fact, found another way to work on her writing while being a mother of two, “I try to keep them busy. When we have study time which is really them reading, I’m on the side with my laptop maybe writing something. But a lot of times I let them tell me stories and I show [them] how to develop their stories. We’ll make like a small script, draw stories out in a notepad and what it does is help me with writer’s block because it distracts me from where my story is, and at the same time, I’m teaching my kids to create and develop stories. 

So I do activities with them and one of the best cures for writer’s block is to distract yourself. And by the time I go back to my project I’m refreshed because I had time to blow it off and work on it.”