GREEN FILMMAKING: HOW TO DO IT

Reducing your carbon footprint, on a film set, is a massive undertaking. As we know, the nature of filmmaking lends itself towards a destructive process. From creating sets intended to be torn down as soon as the shoot's done to the basics like water bottles left all over set—this is a naturally high impact process. But there's definitely things we can do to reduce our footprint.

Let's get into it.

1. Go Paperless Start by eliminating all papers from set. Notify the cast and crew ahead of time and advise them to reference documents from their phones when possible. Make sure you have a laptop for everyone to look at and access during the shot to review sides, call sheets, scripts, shot lists, etc as needed.

2. No Single Use Plastics The easiest way to go about this is to completely eliminate the need for buying plastic water bottle multipacks and encourage cast and crew to bring their own reusable water bottles or provide them with one. Same thing for coffee cups and thermoses. If you're doing this though, make sure everyone on set has easy access to drinking water.

3. Set Up Recycling Make it a priority to have at least 3 trash cans set up: one for recyclables, one for compostables and one for general trash. Encourage people to sort accordingly.

4. Source Locally This is actually a big one. Minimize your carbon footprint by sourcing cast, crew, props, goods, materials, production support and services from within a 100 mile radius of where you're planning to shoot.

5. Minimize Company Moves We're not saying you need to use less locations (although, it's probably cheaper if we're being honest), but try and organize rideshares and carpools for company moves if you can. You can acheive this by asking crew members to ride together to the next location or hire a van to drive from location to location.

6. Recycle Sets If you're building a set or adding on to an existing location, you can try sourcing materials from other sets shooting or being torn down around the same time. Prop houses usually know what's shooting around you that might have similar styles, so they're a good starting point. For 'We Choose To Go' we recycled old set flats on the verge of being disposed of into raw materials for our cryo-chambers, and repainted set panels from another shoot into paneling for our space ship.

7. Avoid using A.I. As we just learned, ChatGPT creates 8 tons Co2 annually. For context, one ChatGPT search generates roughly 4.32g of Co2 while a Google search is about .2g of Co2. And that's just ChatGPT.

8. Practice Leave No Trace A lot of film locations are outside, we know this. Always make sure to pick up your trash and all your belongings and leave the location you're shooting at the same as you found it or better. This means picking up trash that was there before you get there too.

9. Choose and Provide Plant Based catering How thoroughly you want to implement this one is on you. But making sure there's plant based options for meal time is one of many ways you can reduce your impact. And if you want to go the extra mile you can use apps like To Good To Go to buy food on the edge of becoming food waste for your set's crafty table for the next day (or just politely ask a bakery/cafe for the goods they're going to throw out that they were unable to sell by end of day)

We're not gonna mention the obvious like using rechargable batteries, choosing electric and solar powered options when possilbe, using LED lights—because most have these have become the norm of economical indie filmmaking lately. The biggest thing about choosing to run green productions is communication, from start to finish you need to communicate to everyone that this is a green production and the practices you're implementing to ensure that.

By reducing our impact, we can continue to elevate the communities we're showcasing our screen and make sure our storytelling remains sustainable. These are a few tips to get you started on the path of green filmmaking, but if you're interested in taking on green productions, check out how to make your film green film certified and the Green Production Guide—which also has a helpful vendor database.