THERE’S AN INCREASING AWARENESS AND CONCERN ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES, BUT I THINK IT’S A PATCHY PICTURE ACROSS THE INDUSTRY AS AWHOLE
SCREEN NEW DEAL The result of the collaboration between Bafta and Arup has been Albert’s Screen New Deal report, published in September 2020. Data from 19 productions – primarily studio tentpole movies, with a budget of $70 million or more – were analysed for their carbon footprint and sustainability practices. Additionally, the report sourced more than 50 interviews with stakeholders, from studios, productions, industry bodies and service providers in the US and UK, including designers, location managers, line producers, studio managers, lighting specialists, energy experts and sustainability consultants. Five film studio sites were visited across England, Wales and California. One unit base, and its corresponding film location, were visited in England. The broad conclusion was that film and TV production is extremely carbon-intensive, with the amount of damage caused varying by the size of the production and genre. According to Arup’s calculations, the production phase of a typical big, tentpole film: y y Consumes enough power to run Times Square for 5 days. y y Consumes enough fuel to fill an average car 11,478 times. y y Racks up enough air miles for 11 one-way trips from the Earth to the moon. y y Generates waste equal to the weight of 313.5 blue whales. y y Goes through enough plywood to fill 2.5 cargo planes. y y Uses as many plastic bottles as 168 people would use in a year. The sustainability data point that urgently outweighs all others right now is carbon emissions. The production of an average major film generates 2840 tonnes of CO 2 e (carbon dioxide equivalent). According to the US
Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) online greenhouse equivalencies calculator, that’s the same as burning 15.6 railcars’ worth of coal or 6575 barrels of oil. To draw down this amount of carbon from the planet’s atmosphere, the EPA calculator works out you need to grow 46,960 tree seedlings for ten years. Over half of a production’s emissions originate from transport – 70% from land transport and 30% from air travel – with the rest largely produced by energy production. The widespread use of diesel generators for production power contributes 15% of a production’s total emissions – more than the total produced by flying. The total emissions produced by temporary accommodations in hotels and rented apartments equates to 4%, which on most busy productions are only occupied between midnight and 4am, when the crew tries to catch a little sleep. categories: ‘Now’ changes that can be implemented immediately; ‘New’ changes that can be adopted fairly easily; and ‘Next’ changes that require radical change and drive to implement. At the top of the recommendations for the present was an immediate ban on productions using diesel generators. Other measures include implementing creative deconstruction of sets – so that materials can be reused rather than the current practice of scrapping them – and employing warehouses to store materials for use by other productions. Producers should also make it a priority to use sustainably and locally sourced items RECOMMENDATIONS The report broke up its recommendations into three when raw materials are needed. Passive design – the intelligent use of nature in temperature,
TRANSPORT MAKESUP50% OF ALL EMISSIONS ONA TENTPOLE FILM
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