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Going Green, One Film at a Time: Larry Engel on Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking

Published on April 14, 2009

Earth Day is here and it’s important to remember that going green extends way beyond the home and office to every facet of our lives and livelihoods. As filmmakers, we have a unique opportunity to reduce our impacts through our methods of production, and doing this is much easier, thanks to the recently released Code of Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking. Artist/activist Shira Golding discussed the publication with Co-Author Larry Engel.

What inspired the creation of the Code of Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking?

Larry Engel

I live on a farm. I’m very sensitive to debris and litter, to the cycles of nature and our impact and imprint on the land. And I’ve traveled the world as a filmmaker seeing very clean places and very very dirty places. But I hadn’t really done much about reducing, recycling or anything like that until about two years ago when a class was over and I was cleaning up my stuff and then I had to pick up all the coffee cups and plastic bottles that my students had left behind.

I looked around and I thought, you know, this is just crazy. I’m not going to put up with this anymore. So at the next class, I said, “None of this stuff is allowed back in my classroom. If you want something hot or cold to drink, it has to be in a reusable container. No more trash.” And the students whined that day, but the following week some people didn’t bring anything in and others had bottles and mugs. Then I wrote up a twelve-page guide for greener efforts in Production that I started to distribute to my Production class students and my colleagues at American University.

And how did you end up partnering with Andrew Buchanan and the Filmmakers for Conservation?

I went up to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in the fall of 2007 and I sat in on a Green Filmmaking session that was run by my now Co-Author, Andrew Buchanan, from the United Kingdom. I was really taken by what he was doing and how he led the discussion. And it turned out that he and I are of the same age, and yet we were the only two in this audience of mostly younger, eager filmmakers and producers, who actually knew what a Carbon Footprint was. We met afterwards and said, “That was really crazy. We know this stuff, how come they don’t?”

And then it sort of sat until a faculty meeting at the Center for Social Media at American University with Pat Aufderheide, a very important person in this world of documentary behavior. I said, “I have this green list on our website and people are using it and our faculty likes it,” and she looked at me and said “Well, we’ve got to do a Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking. You’re leading it!” And I said “Uh really, how do I do that?”

So we formed an ad-hoc committee in the Film and Media Arts division. I led it and one of my colleagues, and also a Producer with whom I work a lot, Sandy Cannon-Brown, spearheaded the research on it. We got going and started developing our principles.

Then I was Skyping with Andrew and I said, “I’m starting to work on this Code of Best Practices in Green Filmmaking,” and he goes “What?! I’m working with Tanya Petersen, the Co-President of Filmmakers for Conservation, on a similar kind of code. We’re trying to produce checklists and trackers that our members can adapt and use with online calculators.

We really want to get this going so that eventually we can have an industry standard and certification.” So we decided to join forces. We were also both interested in trying to get rid of “green washing.” There are a lot of green filmmaking guides out there that say, “Just answer these questions, and if you say ‘Yes’ you get a green stamp.” But there’s no follow-up.

It seems like the choice of the word “Sustainable” rather than “Green” in the Code’s title is significant – is that also a response to the “green washing” phenomenon?

We felt that while “Green” is the right word for catching attention, it also is laden with misunderstanding. We wanted to distance ourselves from that, and we wanted to be a bit more sustainable ourselves. “Sustainable” works because it not only includes the issues we’re focused on currently vis-á-vis carbon as the main ingredient of climate change and global warming, but we’re also looking to the future. And very soon we hope that more broad environmental footprint calculators and offsets will be available.

Is the Code specific to documentary filmmaking?

We actually ended up pulling the word “Documentary” from the title. We felt that the principles themselves do not change regardless of the genre of production. What is a bit more specific are the trackers and the checkers – they’re really designed for smaller operations that focus on a lot of location work, post-production and finishing the way documentary filmmakers do.

What we look forward to next is partnering up with people who can help us develop and modify our checklists for reality TV shows, for commercials, for dramatic productions, and even animations, so that other fields will have more tools to fit their specific needs. Currently, the online calculators are more geared towards building, home use, and service industry work. We’re going to seek out funding to help establish a filmmaking- or documentary filmmaking-specific calculator.

Do you think documentary filmmakers have a particular responsibility to be sustainable?

Yes. Those of us from Filmmakers for Conservation and the Center for Environmental Filmmaking, are very much in the forefront of contact with the most exotic and fragile environments. We’re in the face of animals who are threatened and near extinction, and we make stories about them. It’s important to do that so that the public sees how beautiful and precious our world is, and exactly how fragile it is. Yet, for many many years, it didn’t matter how many Land Rovers you had – it didn’t quite matter what imprint you made on the land or the animals. And that didn’t make any sense.

This came to me many many years ago when I was working with a dear friend of mine and Co-Producer, Tom Lucas, out in Yellowstone. We had done an hour-long film for the National Wildlife Federation and PBS called Wildfire. We were tracking the ‘88 Yellowstone fires, and in the winter we went back to see how the park was doing, and we witnessed many many elks starving.

One of the researchers with whom we were working said, “You know, we’ve been doing studies about the caloric impact of human contact on animals from the back-country, and we learned that one contact can burn up hundreds of calories. Even if the animal doesn’t run or leave or do anything, just the stress and awareness, the adrenaline, consumes calories. In a marginal year, human contact could make the difference in the life and death of individual animals.”

At that point Tom and I looked at each other and we said, “Well you know what? We don’t really want to film anymore of these animals.” And she said, “You can keep filming them, but back off. Let’s make sure to use blinds and work in the trees so we minimize contact, instead of clomping around among hares and elks and buffalo. Let’s change our behavior.” Tanya really emphasizes that we have to change the behavior and sensitivity of the whole filmmaking world, from distributors, to programmers, the filmmakers, the manufacturers, all through the line.

Because if we can’t come around to figuring out how to create a sustainable lifestyle as filmmakers, then we’re doing a disservice to our subjects and therefore also to the audience.

The idea of ethical consistency makes a lot of sense, especially because environmental films are often subjected to a lot of scrutiny. If your practices as a filmmaker contradict your message, you could lose a lot of credibility with audiences. How have filmmakers been responding to these ideas?

We did a survey and got 175 respondents worldwide, from individuals to larger corporations, and about sixty percent of the respondents were already doing some things to go green. The single biggest element of confusion had to do with carbon calculators and offsets, so that’s one reason why we really did concentrate on trying to make the principles as clear as we could, and then making sure that the trackers reflect how we produce films.

My understanding from reading the Code is that filmmakers first calculate their potential carbon footprint using a checklist, and then they track their consumption during production.

Yes, and then they can compare their actual footprint to what they had hoped it would be and use one of the Gold Standard offsetters online to pay the difference.

And have you had any filmmakers or organizations endorse the Code?

The IDA, Women in Film & Video DC, and the University Film & Video Association have endorsed the code. We’ve also received about twenty endorsements from the filmmaking community, everywhere from Australia and New Zealand to Europe and the United States.

One thing that seems to distinguish this code from some of the other green filmmaking guides out there is the inclusion of a Science Review Board. What impact do you think their expertise had?

There’s a lot of misunderstanding and not a lot of science behind many of the claims out there. Andrew and I were getting support from the Ford Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund UK respectively, and we needed to get things right. The Science Review Board made specific comments about inaccuracies and made sure that we included Gold Standard offsetters and not schemes that had little scientific basis. By the end of the process they actually congratulated us on our scientific accuracy and I think that reflects our team efforts to really do our research.

I noticed that you included a lot of pragmatic statements throughout the Code. For example, “Remember that doing even a few things to cut carbon emissions and resource use is better than doing nothing at all.” I thought that was really important because some people get paralyzed by all the options.

Those statements came out of the survey and interviews. Some people felt that while they could do some recycling in the office, they were overwhelmed with the enormity of the task of bringing everything green to their production. So we thought, let’s encourage people to embrace the Code and take steps to get buy-in from the team that’s involved in production. The key is that doing anything is a step in the right direction.

If you look at what’s going on globally, at industrial levels, at governmental levels, you can sit there and go, “Why bother? Why should I as an individual or I, as a member of a fourteen-person production crew making a film, care about this?” And it’s my true belief, and I share this with all the people involved in this project, that every person has a responsibility to act, otherwise nothing is going to change.

And the cumulative impact of all these small efforts really does add up.

Yes it does!

One of the suggestions in the Code is promoting and publicizing your film as green. This seems like a really important step.

I think that the citizenry, perhaps even more than governments around the world, is sensitive to these issues. We don’t have a certification board that’s independent of the film profession as LEEDS functions for the field of building and architecture.

That’s a necessary big step in order to have the kind of label you have with the humane treatment of animals in film. People want to see that, they want to know that they’re seeing special effects with animals and that none of them really got hurt. That took a couple of decades to become law. Sometimes things move slowly, but we don’t have the luxury now of waiting that long for a certification process.

But even without official certification, filmmakers can let audiences know what efforts they have made, right?

Of course. If filmmakers use the trackers that we provide and then work with carbon offsetters, they can publicize that online, in press releases, in interviews, at conferences. There are ways both within and outside the industry to emphasize the choices made and savings accomplished both economically and environmentally.

The other thing that I wish we could get out is that things like printing on environmentally-friendly and recycled paper and using soy ink, etc., are much more affordable now, both because of production techniques and because of demand. It takes a little bit of searching, but you can do it.

So are you printing and promoting the Code in a low-impact way?

We’re trying our best! We wanted to publicize the prelaunch in Bristol at Wild Screen. We had to make a choice – do we really want to use materials as opposed to just being electronic. I chose to be a participant in Wild Screen via Skype because I couldn’t justify flying, as much as I wanted to see friends and colleagues.

We proved the concept and my participation was still strong. But, we wanted to give people something to take away and the first thought was postcards. But then we said, “Postcards really aren’t appropriate because they’re throw-aways. What are you going to do with a postcard? You put it on a wall for a while and then you toss it.” So we said, “Let’s use bookmarks – at least there is a life cycle to them and people may use them.” So we made that choice.

Andrew Buchanan did a little research on green printing and found two printers whose costs were the same or even a bit less than non-environmentally-friendly printing techniques. The world really is changing. People have framed the argument that going environmental, going green, paying attention to sustainable practices, costs a lot. In fact, it’s just the opposite – it saves a lot.

If you buy a ten-gallon jug of water instead of half-litre bottles of water, you’re saving money on location. If you use tap water, you’re saving even more.

As a vegan I often get that argument – that you have to be privileged to be vegan, and that’s not really the case.

That’s absurd. In fact, the easiest thing to do to reduce carbon footprints on all productions is to minimize the amount of flesh eaten. Raising domestic animals for food contributes twenty percent of all the global greenhouse gases. I would have loved to have put that in the document.

I did see reducing meat consumption in one of the checklists.

Yeah, we did include it, but we didn’t say how enormous that contribution is. We’ll have to add it to the Frequently Asked Questions online.

Do you have any examples of any filmmakers who are already using some of these strategies?

Andrew Buchanan did a project that was mostly archival. He tracked his carbon footprint during production, and offset it as part of his budget with National Geographic.

And what about the BBC series Planet Earth – were they green?

Their production techniques really aren’t sustainable. And this is part of the problem. If you’re really truly going to go green I guess you just don’t make films. If you really want to be carbon neutral, you can’t do anything. We have to look at minimizing, and we have to look at trade-offs. Planet Earth is a spectacular series, it’s just gorgeous.

And it directly addresses climate change throughout the series, which was very bold.

Yes, and I’m sure that everyone on the production was aware of their impact throughout, no matter where they were on the globe, but a lot of the beauty, the impact, the story, came at an environmental cost. The question is were there offsets? Especially in this economic climate where everyone is stretched thin, it’s hard to get producers to spend money on a line item that doesn’t directly go on the screen. But, when you think about a four- or five-hundred dollar outlay for an hour show, which is generally how much these offsets cost, it’s shocking to me that the industry can’t accept that.

Is equipment getting any more green?

The manufacturers – the Panasonics, the Sonys, the Canons, the JVCs – they’re multinational and they have many governments pressuring them. They recognize that sustainability is important, not just for the environment, but for their productivity, for their ability to reduce resource use.

A whole push on engineering is going in that direction. And in our industry we are rapidly moving away from tape-based systems. And while there are environmental concerns and costs, sometimes serious ones, with producing chips and computers, etc, overall tapeless production is far better environmentally than tape-based systems.

Are filmmakers going to start incorporating these green strategies and offsets into their fundraising efforts?

Yes, I believe that that’s going to be the case. I think there are two ways that our industry is going to get more sustainable. One is bottom-up, with our kind of effort at the individual and then group and then community level, and then I think it’s going to be top-down from funders, from programmers, when they realize that they really have to do what they can for their audience and the larger community. It’s a combination.

I would love to see the Code applied to film festivals. It drives me crazy, just the amount of disposables and swag, and at conferences, too!

Oh yeah, I can’t stand seeing plastic cups. I wish I had enough money to buy everyone one of those reusable cups. But it is changing. Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and several others are using biodegradable plates and cooking oils to generate electricity!

So how did you promote the release of the Code?

The first step took place at Wild Screen in Bristol, where we announced the launch and publication. Then on February 3rd, at the Reel Screen Summit in Washington, DC, we had an hour presentation called “Taking Production Green.”

We announced the publication and distributed limited printed copies of the Code. At the same time, we published it online with all the tools on American University’s Center for Social Media and Center for Environmental Media sites, and on the Filmmakers for Conservation site. It’s an open set of documents and we’re happy, through Creative Commons licensing, to have anyone use all the documents and post them on their sites.

Will there be ongoing outreach?

Yes, we look forward to presenting workshops, to collaborating with organizations such as IDA and the Producers Guild of America to really embrace this and push it through and revise it and make it better. After publication, another major goal is to get this translated into as many languages as we possibly can. We really need Spanish, Chinese, many other languages – we really want this to reach people.

That’s a great goal! Anything else you’d like to share?

Going back to how this all started, I never really thought that picking up a bunch of students’ coffee cups would lead to this. It really reminds me that sometimes what one person or a couple of people think about doing and start acting on, can actually have an impact.

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Shira Golding is a filmmaker and musician who enjoys spontaneously choreographing dance routines and playing competitive sports. She has no sense of smell and is obsessed with vegan sneakers. Find out more about her and her work at www.shirari.com.

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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