Jessica Charlton

Jessica Charlton is a New Zealand cinematographer and scriptwriter who has worked since 2009 on over 30 short films, television productions, and feature-length films as well as music videos, web series, and documentaries. Charlton was born in London but raised in Invercargill and Queenstown.

In 2012 she shared with Juliet Bergh the New Zealand Writers Guild awards for Best Feature Film Script and New Writer Award for Existence, a feature-length drama starring Loren Taylor (co-star of Eagle vs Shark) and Matt Sunderland. It premiered in the 2012 New Zealand International Film Festival, and was also accepted that year as part of the Industry-only Breakthru Screenings at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Existence is also notable because the production team is "predominantly" female, including the producers Mhairead Connor and Melissa Dodds. Unusually, Meridian Energy gave the filmmakers special permission to film at the Makara West-Wind Farm, on Wellington's south coast, as part of a 24-day shoot. Connor, whose participation in the project was "sought out by the NZFC," has acknowledged that working out of Wellington, with its community of top-level film craft workers, added production value to the film. Additionally, the Existence team were among the last filmmakers to have the benefit of working with Graeme Tetley on developing their script. According to Bergh, working with Tetley, a pillar of New Zealand theatre, television, and film acting and scriptwriting over many decades, "was instrumental in making this film possible. He was a wonderful example of the generosity and extraordinary talent of the local film industry."

Existence, which participated in the second year of the New Zealand Film Commission’s low-budget Escalator scheme, is also the first film completed as part of that scheme. That year Escalator offered financial and other support to provide "four teams of talented, visionary filmmakers a fast track to making a first feature film." Escalator limits a project's budget to NZ$250,000, and requires "creative filmmaking ideas explicitly conceived with low budget production in mind." Beyond the funding, the Existence team have praised the Escalator scheme's additional benefits, especially its "boot camp" (a 4-day workshop), calling it "a great stepping-stone into feature film production."

NZ on Screen calls Existence a "low budget," "salvagepunk" film, and describes it as "a rare entry in the Kiwi sci-fi feature catalogue." Charlton also worked on the short "sci-fi, action/adventure film" Flip (2019; written and directed by Jessica Grace Smith). Like Existence, it deals with an isolated mother trying to save her family in a "post-apocalyptic" environment. These films also tie into an older, more established tradition of Kiwi storytelling, the "man alone" story set in scenic natural environments, often found in New Zealand's early new wave films of the 1980s, such as Navigator, Quiet Earth, and Vigil.

In 2017 Charlton shot Jessica Grace Smith's award-winning Everybody Else is Taken, as well as directed Discord. In 2022 she executive produced Buzzkill.