Starting our sustainable video production journey!
Over the last couple of months we’ve been reviewing what we do as a company and our purpose. Which naturally ended with us doing a complete revamp of the brand, who we are, and our goals. The biggest goal now being to find ways to be more in peace with the planet, add positive impact and all that good stuff. So this year we’re making wyld. Into a clean, green killing machine. Wait.
A clean green storytelling machine. That’s better!
The biggest challenge we’re finding is that there’s not a lot of info out there specific to video production. There’s some about the general film industry. Which is not looking pretty.. Did you know that the film industry is a bigger polluter than most major industries like travel, airlines etc. when you look comparatively to the size of the industry. Yikes. Not that surprising considering how wasteful it can be with all the set builds, props and power generation. BUT run and gun filmmaking, branded content and ads where things move quicker and change quickly, isn’t exactly the same.
“A study into the environmental impact of film-making in Hollywood, conducted by the University of California, showed that, in the Los Angeles region, it made a larger contribution, in relation to its size, to air pollution than most major industries, including aerospace manufacturing, clothing, and the hotel industry”
So we’ve been scouring resources and are now working on a definite list of how to make videos more sustainably.. But for now here’s some of our key findings:
THE CLOUD IS NOT GREEN. For some reason never thought about the carbon cost of data storage. But it’s actually insane. We found that as a company, our biggest Co2 emission is actually DATA. We have about 42tb backed up in the cloud which was contributing 50-100 tons of carbon per year. (JUST QUICK CAVEAT, all of these numbers are veeeery rough based on dodgy research and references on the internet. But nevertheless, data is a big issue, and it’s important to use the the right providers. BUT also importantly, compress your data, and don’t save unnecessary footage that’s not in any way required, it kills trees my dude!
“It is estimated that data centers worldwide consume about 3 percent of the global electricity and account for roughly 2 percent of total emissions. That’s about the same as the entire airline industry. ”
CAMERA AND KIT IS A MINEFIELD to work out, as there’s not that much information. Both Sony and Canon have “green initiatives” but how green they actually are is hard to verify. BUT what is important to note is that…
“for most electronics about 80% of their lifetime carbon emissions is the initial production cost… ”
So, shocker but the best thing we can do is not to constantly upgrade our kits. Which of course is tough, cos we love a shiny bit of gear. But staying used, working with a wide network of people with different tools for different jobs can work here. The goal isn’t to stifle innovation or stop new cameras being used, but to make sure we make the most out of the tools we have.
Props and set. This is a big issue. You’ll have a set built specifically for this shoot props made for it, clothes, everything. And usually it just goes in a dump. So we're looking at ways to recycle it or get some more use out of it. There's a few companies that are offering this specifically to the film industry, but for a lot of things, the easiest way is actually just to donate to a charity shop. Some people might actually need that thing, and if you can just give it away for free, that's pretty good.
We're starting out this whole journey of figuring out how to be a slightly nicer, more positive and sustainable video production company, to get on board with sustainable ways of doing it. There’s lots of challenges, lots of things to work on and figure out, like what mode of transport we’re using, especially with international shoots where flying out the crew and talent quickly becomes the biggest carbon cost there is. There’s also several challenge around what food is being served on set and so on.
What we’re doing isn’t perfect, it’s just about starting to move in the right direction! Our goal is to create a simple checklist for our videos so we have a rough understanding of what impact each video we make have on the environment, then try to reduce it and offset (hopefully avoiding the dodgy offset companies) what we can’t by planting some trees.
DISCLAIMER: Bellow are all the links we’ve found scattered around the internet that is part of this blog. Just FYI, this is not a scientific article we’re unfortunately not full-time researchers, so our links and sources are questionable, it’s the internet after all. It’s challenging to find accurate info on this topic so we’re finding what we can, hopefully learning some things that can (fingers crossed) help us make our videos in the most sustainable way. :)
https://www.climateneutralgroup.com/en/news/carbon-emissions-of-data-centers/
https://www.capgemini.com/gb-en/insights/expert-perspectives/are-you-aware-of-your-digital-carbon-footprint/
