Abstract

Age of Consent originated as a story idea about two high school girls exploring a world beyond their own. Throughout a year’s time, this concept developed into a structured story and later a screenplay. The script was written without dialogue, to emphasize the role of cinematography in narrative storytelling. The short silent film was successfully produced and shot on 16mm color negative film. Independently financed and produced, Age of Consent is a precautionary tale of the dangers that lurk in the world, adolescent loss of innocence, and betrayal of trust between friends. In accordance with emphasizing cinematography’s role in visual storytelling, and in order to research new post-production technologies, the processed film was transferred not to standard definition video for editing, but rather to a high definition digital format that retains approximately four times more image quality. I selected DVCPRO-HD as my HD codec because this is the highest image quality format that was both offered by the film laboratory and supported by Final Cut Pro HD, my editing program. This post-production option for student and independent filmmakers is a recently available service that has not yet been utilized by anyone at University of North Carolina Wilmington. I have attended film studies production classes for three years, completed directed individual studies in specific film production topics, and researched film production through texts such as Cinematography by Blain Brown, Motion Picture and Video Lighting by Blain Brown, and Film Lighting by Kris Malkiewicz. My film influences include selections from the films of David Lynch, selections from the film noir genre, and Tony Scott’s True Romance. My goals were to write, direct, produce, photograph, and edit this film in high definition. Age of Consent is the first HD student production to be screened at this university. Preliminary screenings have yielded positive audience responses, and the film was well accepted at the Flicker Film Festival on campus. The following is an overview of the process, throughout the three stages of pre-production, production, and post-production.