SUSTAINABILITY IN POST
– is that the more that can be offloaded to the digital world, the better. ‘We’ll fix it in post’ has also come to be a part of climate policy. It’s perfectly commonsensical to assume that building a physical set causes more environmental damage than creating it digitally, whether that’s in a virtual production volume or via VFX. Many are the horror stories from sustainability consultants who have watched multiple containers of set materials heading off to landfill. The same green assumptions apply to using the cloud for live broadcast as it can substantially reduce the movement of people and equipment. Keeping in mind that travel is one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, doing things in a data centre must be greener than in a facility or having to move gear to a location. But the fact is, we don’t really know. TO CLOUD OR NOT TO CLOUD Cloud providers are famously reluctant to provide fully transparent emissions data to their customers. At the AWS re:Invent conference in 2023, Amazon vice president and CTO Werner Vogels famously declared that ‘cost is a pretty good approximation of sustainability’. So the cheaper your Amazon bill, the lower your emissions. By this logic, the cheaper your flight, the better it is for the planet. Despite research being done on the sector, we still don’t have a great idea of how much our individual cloud use is costing environmentally. We do know that, as an industry, the cloud has a global carbon impact larger than the airline industry and uses a tremendous volume of water for cooling. On the other hand, data centres can be very efficient, automatically taking advantage of any idle computer power. But they’ll often also generate a backup instance for customers automatically as security, meaning the work – and energy – is effectively doubled. However, chips are also getting more and more efficient. Each new data centre built can do much more than its predecessors, with less energy. And then there’s AI… The point is, the environmental impact of data centres is astonishingly complicated, but we know it’s massive.
IDENTIFYING IMPACTS Post houses such as Dirty Looks are making efforts towards reaching net zero emissions
We should not automatically pat ourselves on the backs believing that digital work is always greener than physical work. ARTOO DETOO VS R2-D2 Dr Rebecca Harrison, an expert in product life cycle assessment – and a huge Star Wars fan – researched the environmental impact of four selected assets from the original Star Wars trilogy as compared to their digitally created counterparts in the Star Wars prequels. One comparison was between Kenny Baker’s original Artoo Detoo costume and the entirely digital droid in Attack of the Clones . The digital version proved to be six times more carbon intensive than the manufactured aluminium and fibreglass original. Digital offers flexibility, efficiency and creative possibilities that would be
impossible in a purely analogue world. It allows you to try things out – whether it’s a rapid re-edit or new blocking in a VFX scene – that would be impractical in the physical world. But each of these new versions costs energy. The cost might be minimal if it’s recutting a scene at a single workstation, but rendering multiple versions of an elaborate effects scene to show producers on Monday morning has a much bigger carbon footprint. UNDER YOUR OWN ROOF Whether post-production facilities have an advantage over the travelling circus of a film shoot is debatable, but there’s more control over the provenance of their energy. A post house can select energy suppliers that specialise in low- carbon energy – or bug their landlords to do so – and install their own solar panels, heat pumps or improved insulation.
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