Moorestown natives Nathan Krachman (left) and Colin Llewellyn, co-founders of A Butterfly Production, will start shooting their first feature film at the Jersey shore in 2026.
A film production company founded by two Moorestown natives will start shooting its first feature in Wildwood next year.
“(It’s) personal to me because I spent all my summers – every single summer – down the Jersey shore, in North Wildwood,” said Colin Llewellyn, co-founder with Nathan Krachman of A Butterfly Production, about the company’s film, “Atlantic Avenue.”
“We would love to bring both Moorestown and North Wildwood together around this film because it’s so centralized to the culture in New Jersey,” Llewellyn added. “We want to make something that not only we’re proud of, but the town can be proud of as well.”
“We want the movie to feel like – in a lot of ways – a celebration of North Wildwood,” Krachman noted. “We want it to be a movie that resonates with everybody, but we want it to be the ‘insider secret’ for people in Jersey and Philly who understand exactly what we’re talking about.
“We want to make it something that’s not just Colin and ours, but something that we can all share as a community.”
“Atlantic Avenue” tells the story of 13-year-old Owen, who finds himself in trouble after befriending a group of older high-school students. It’s about his trials and tribulations growing up too fast and meeting people a little too experienced, according to Llewellyn.
Both he and Krachman conceptualized a project like the film last November, and have spent the past nine months writing the script. Llewellyn will direct and Krachman will produce. After 12 drafts, the pair recently settled on the final script. It’s the most ambitious project they’ve ever taken on.
“We always said as we were writing it, ‘When you’re a kid, you want to be an adult, and when you’re an adult, you immediately want to be a kid again,’ and so we wanted to explore all facets of that,” Krachman pointed out. “We got to a place on the script where we love it so much and care for it so much it feels like our shared child, and now it makes however hard these next few years are going to be working on this movie – it makes it feel worth it.”
“Every young kid’s dream who’s ever wanted to be in this industry and work as a filmmaker, is to make a movie,” Llewellyn commented. “To be at the helm and direct something that’s not only so hard but so personal, it’s something that, frankly, you really don’t know if you’ll ever get another opportunity to do it again. It’s life changing.
“That idea of making something and putting everything you have into these two, two-and-a-half, three years … it’s going to be something that I can look back on.”
Krachman and Llewellyn are currently casting actors to play characters they have developed and fallen in love with. There will come a point during filming, Llewellyn projected, where the actors know their character better the filmmakers do. That’s all they can hope for, Llewellyn observed, and now that the script is complete, he and Krachman are excited to embark on the next part of the journey.
“Nobody is ever at a place of just pure calm,” Krachman acknowledged. “There’s always something you’re striving to go forward into or to go back into. That’s what we wanted to tackle with this movie … the idea of what the kind of feeling is going to be when we see these characters alive and on screen.
“That’s what’s going to push us for the next two-and-a-half years to get to the finish line.”
“When you can find people that care just as much about making this a reality as we did, then it takes a load off your shoulders,” Llewellyn stated. “Personally, this is my heart, and this is something that I have to put my all into. I’m (ready) to get back on a film set, in the director’s chair.
“It’s something that I love more than life itself.”
“Atlantic Avenue” is completely independent of any major studio. Krachman and Llewellyn are making the film with a budget of $30,000, an amount being raised on their own. It will be shot next January, May and July, because it helps financing to space the movie out in three different periods, Llewellyn explained.
But the duo can also take advantage of filming indoors during the winter and before the crowds hit the town. Following filming, they plan to spend the rest of 2026 and the first half of 2027 editing and locking other elements in, including a score and mixing.
“Atlantic Avenue” is expected to be released by early 2028.
“We’ve built a lot of good faith over the past few years, and we’re hoping that the community is excited – with us – about what we’re trying to do here to help make this a reality,” Krachman offered. “We know that we’re never going to be able to make a movie in this exact way again. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity …
“We can only do it exactly this way once, so we want to make it count and we want to take our time, and we want to make it something worth waiting for.”
For updates on “Atlantic Avenue,” follow @atlanticavenuemovie on Instagram and on TikTok, or A Butterfly Production’s social media, Instagram and YouTube. Find other information at www.abutterflyproduction.com.
